Author of quotes: Sergei Dovlatov: the Life and opinions

We are very different people and different love, but hate seems to be one and the same. This is much more important. We're both the most hated and despised charlatans.

Literature of France is as beautiful as France itself. French prose sometimes fanciful, almost feminine. But the French were superb stylists.

In England, no artists, no composers, no poets, but there is great prose. Simple, long-winded, I would say the business prose.

Soviet prose does not exist. But there are some great books. They should be read.

The worldview and life circumstances are intimately linked. I'm not a dissident, not a revolutionary, not a dissenter. I tried to be apolitical.

The paradox lies in the fact that we do not choose and find a calling, it chooses and finds us. And when that happens and will happen - is unknown.

We live in a bad time and in a poor country where lies and dishonesty have the same instinct as hunger and love.

People who at least once have experienced serious danger, learned great fear, will never be a dude and a blowhard.

I'm sorry for what was once a happy
Before our meetings short and infrequent.

I don't agree that an engineer, for example, can be just, and the writer - certainly - Leo Tolstoy. You can write not too much and not too brilliant, but about the important things and really.

I continue to dream about how to write a good story, which, however, may enter some poetry.

They say that if the cigarette goes out
Someone says certainly,
If it was everything in life so clear,
I used all trusted the signs.

Here [in the army] as ever, I clearly "feel", I "feel". It's hard to explain. I just reach here the limits and boundaries of my power, know his nature, see the gaps and lack of, can determine exactly when I lack courage and bravery.

This is just a sad coincidence
The fact that happiness is in the door I knocked.