As The Fathers Live, So The Children

In The Camp, This Meant Committing My Verse-many Thousands Of Lines-to Memory. To Help Me With This I Improvised Decimal Counting Beads And, In Transit Prisons, Broke Up Matchsticks And Used The Fragments As Tallies. As I Approached The End Of My Sentences I Grew More Confident Of My Powers Of Memory, And Began Writing Down And Memorizing Prose-dialogue At First, But Then, Bit By Bit, Whole Densely Written Passages. My Memory Found Room For Them! It Worked. But More And More Of My Time-in The End As Much As One Week Every Month-went Into The Regular Repetition Of All I Had Memorized.

Today When We Say The West We Are Already Referring To The West And To Russia. We Could Use The Word 'modernity' If We Exclude Africa, And The Islamic World, And Partially China.

Even If We Are Spared Destruction By War, Our Lives Will Have To Change If We Want To Save Life From Self-destruction.

A State Of War Only Serves As An Excuse For Domestic Tyranny.

Generosity Is A Two-edged Virtue For An Artist - It Nourishes His Imagination But Has A Fatal Effect On His Routine.