Of the gladdest moments in human life, methinks, is the departure upon a distant journey into unknown lands. Shaking off with one mighty effort the fetters of Habit, the leaden weight of Routine, the cloak of many Cares and the slavery of Civilization, man feels once more happy.

To be a Russian writer at the end of the nineteenth century must have meant bearing an inescapably bitter fate. The more they tried to escape from Russia, the more deeply Russia swallowed them.

In nothing is the difference between the Americans and the Soviets so marked as in the attitude, not only toward writers, but of writers toward their system. For in the Soviet Union the writer's job is to encourage, to celebrate, to explain, and in every way to carry forward the Soviet system. Whereas in America, and in England, a good writer is the watch-dog of society. His job is to satirize its silliness, to attack its injustices, to stigmatize its faults. And this is the reason that in America neither society nor government is very fond of writers. The two are completely opposite approaches toward literature.

One does not go to Moscow to get fat.

There is no sadder symbol of the crippling poverty in which millions of peasants were forced to live than the image of a peasant and his son struggling to drag a plough through the mud.

Back in Russia we were dirt-poor. Here in the West we are still poor but have risen above the dirt to tower alongside stalks of grass!