Book: Signs of attention (compilation). Page 2

The degree of social activity or passivity of the artist (not just artist) depends only on his personal temperament, and, again, personal choice.

Art sometimes consciously, and often unconsciously assumes the functions of the organs of the social organism who refuse to work.

According to what you quoted who and what quote (or quanitity) responds, can be seen a lot. Some quote the promotional TVC, the other Pushkin and Gogol. Some remarks on characters from popular cartoons, other harms or Mandelstam.

...Life, still more bizarre than all the predictions of the most astute forecasters.

...Punishment is when you are deprived of reason, of conscience, of taste and of moral instinct.

...When the joke and life become indistinguishable from each other, it smells like a semiotic accident.

On the one hand, living in our country [Russia], not to joke, as only this one saved from a bottomless existential despair. On the other hand, jokes are always dangerous. And not only in the sense that it is dangerous to life and health of the Joker. It is dangerous for the fact that any joke has an amazing ability to get rough reality.

...The world is not obliged to comply with our sustainable idea of it.

Our history is not a series of successive ideas. This is only a "volte-face" that is changing the authoritative lexicon and phraseology, to adopt - sometimes not just metaphorically, but in literal sense of this word is another power, as it is said in our days, elite.

The heat sometimes becomes a major information occasion. But such idiomatic momentum as a "hot debate" or "hot line", are rapidly losing their metaphors.