Character: on behalf of the author. Page 1

All the children sat quietly on the school benches and learned from their teachers; our chamomile also sat quietly on its stem and learned from the clear sun and from all the surrounding nature, learned to recognize the goodness of God.

Chamomile didn’t care at all that she was such a poor, simple flower that no one sees or notices in the thick grass; no, she was happy with everything, greedily reached out to the sun, admired it and listened to the lark singing somewhere high, high in the sky.

The construction site, of course, was fenced - but where in Russia have you seen a fence that you cannot penetrate? Here the board is hanging on one nail, here the corner post is askew and the mesh is bent in an inviting way. There are always holes, this is such a fundamental law of Russian life. And maybe not only Russian.

Behind-the-scenes ballet intrigues taught Polina a harsh rule: no one should know anything unnecessary about you. Or better yet, they don’t know anything at all. If you open it even a little bit, you will instantly receive a blow, predators will rush in, grab onto the soft meat and tear at the living meat until they bite you to death.

For all his detachment from real life, in legal documents he was not at all a fool. If only because he knew how to read. Not in the sense of putting letters into words, but in the sense of understanding what is written, regardless of the style of presentation.

At first it seemed like it was even fun to invent characters and their actions, pull strings, move the plot here or there. And then suddenly it turned out that there was no mention of any invention, that the plot was moving not according to her wishes, but according to its own, that actions were not invented, but happened as if by themselves. The famous Pushkin Imagine,

The branches twitched and a cat appeared in the circle of light. Quite skinny, twitching her shoulder dissatisfiedly and clasping her paws in disgust. Three-colored, Mark noted with unexpected pleasure. This is good luck. The symbol of good luck, without even looking in his direction, proudly walked to the house next to the public garden. Even the back symbolized independence and contempt for everything around him, especially for the man sticking out like a pillar near the frozen square. Who are you? Passerby? That would have passed.

Not every book has to be filled with symbolism, irony or melodic language (after all, it's not called prose for nothing), but it seems to me that every book - at least those that are worth reading - should be about something.

Stories and novels are not souvenir T-shirts or wooden football players. These are relics, remnants of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his toolbox to get them out of the ground, damaging them as little as possible. Sometimes the fossil is small, just a shell. Sometimes huge, a Tyrannosaurus rex with all its giant ribs and bared teeth. In any case - a short story or a thousand-page novel - the excavation technique is essentially the same.

Everyone has their own truth.

... you cheated me once - shame on you. If you cheated me a second time, let me be ashamed. He cheated me a third time - let both of us be ashamed.

Sometimes they would beat him until he could barely stand, then they would take him into a cell and throw him on the stone floor like a sack of potatoes, leave him alone for a couple of hours to come to his senses a little, then take him out again and continue to beat him.

The job of a fiction writer is to find the inner truth in the woven web of a fictional story, not to sacrifice intellectual honesty in pursuit of dough.

You came into this world as a human being, and if you do not feel your unity with the universe, that is, do not use the priceless opportunity inherent in this moment, your human life will be wasted. Simply eating, sleeping, reproducing, and dying does not require the sophisticated body, mind, and consciousness that you are now endowed with. Not exploring this amazing gift is monstrous stupidity.