Author of quotes: Alexander Genis

Why you need a book, if they do not differ from life? Literature also exists to thicken it into poetry. All literature - poetry, including prose.

Reading is private, portable, public, everyday happiness - for all and free.

Learn how to read the rest: mastering the alphabet, exploring relationships, understanding goals and evaluating tools, but most importantly - putting yourself in the place of the author. To become a good reader should be a writer, or - at least - to be alone with him.

The school must teach not what to read, and that - as. Especially today, when the XXI century has offered the book as a seductive set of alternatives that the reading can degenerate into an aristocratic hobby like riding or ballroom dancing.

Reduced to the ideas of literature is empty and barren, like a mountain chain.

Japanese treastise, haiku surprise her promiscuity. These verses do not "grow out of litter" and stay with him. They still to talk about, because it is not important the picture is and look. Haiku does not tell you what the poet sees, and forces us to see what is seen without him. We see the world not as it seems to us, and not what it could be and not as it ought to be. We see the world the way he'd been without us. Haiku don't photograph the moment, and carve it on the stone. They stop the passage of time, as stopped, not a broken clock.

Tamara, Dovlatov's Estonian wife, recalls how, appointing her on the phone meeting, he described himself: "Like a merchant apricots. A large, black, you will be in fear."

Sergei hated everything that is not literature. When we first met, I asked if he liked fish. Hard to believe that an innocent question could cause such a storm. "Madman, who wanted to, he can love Faulkner".

Exchange of views is only useful when you can convince yourself and not the other. From this point of view Dovlatov was the worst of all possible interlocutors. He did not talked and others didn't give it any concept froze on his lips as mutton fat.

The fact that nothing spoils as easily as greed. Parsimony is akin to skin diseases. Because she is not dying, it is not sympathy, and disgust. I wasn't quite a full-fledged Vice, it is not intended and forgiveness is only a mockery.

The writers of the previous generation talked about how ideas change the world. Dovlatov wrote about how ideas are changing the world - and no ideas, and change nothing.

There are only two successful ways of relationship with the world: the first is to treat everyone bad, second good. In any case, the world will not deceive your expectations.

Dangerous not to distinguish the reality in which we live, from that in which we think.

Correctly ripped the quote in other people's mouths sounds better than copyright.