YEVGENY YEVTUSHENKO

He who is conceived in a cage yearns for the cage.

In my blood there is no Jewish blood. In their callous rage, all anti-Semites must hate me now as a Jew. For that reason I am a true Russian.

In Russia all tyrants believe poets to be their worst enemies.

Give me a mystery - just a plain and simple one - a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little bare-foot mystery: give me a mystery - just one!

Literature has to serve as a moral control of politics.

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

Envy is an insult to oneself.

Only when the sense of the pain of others begins does man begin.

Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?

Time has a way of demonstrating that the most stubborn are the most intelligent.

Sorrow happens, hardship happens, the hell with it, who never knew the price of happiness, will not be happy.

Translation is like a woman. If it is beautiful, it is not faithful. If it is faithful, it is most certainly not beautiful.

I love sport because I love life, and sport is one of the basic joys of life.

Justice is like a train that is nearly always late.

I do not like poems that resemble hay compressed into a geometrically perfect cube. I like it when the hay, unkempt, uncombed, with dry berries mixed in it, thrown together gaily and freely, bounces along atop some truck-and more, if there are some lovely and healthy lasses atop the hay-and better yet if the branches catch at the hay, and some of it tumbles to the road.

Those who are used to a cage will weep for a cage.

He watched through a crack inside just pretending to be dead he wanted to fix each pallbearer in his memory . . . it seems to me a telephone was installed in the coffin to someone yet again Stalin is sending his instructions.

In general, in poetry and literature, I am among those people who believe that too much is indispensable.

No Jewish blood runs among my blood,but I am as bitterly and hardly hatedby every anti-semiteas if I were a Jew. By thisI am a Russian.

Everything I do, I do on the principle of Russian borscht. You can throw everything into it beets, carrots, cabbage, onions, everything you want. What's important is the result, the taste of the borscht.

Ever since then I have known that if all the values in this world are more or less questionable, the most important thing in life is kindness.

To partly remain a child: that is to be really mature.

No people are uninteresting. Their fate is like the chronicles of planets. Nothing in them is not particular, and planet is dissimilar from planet.

Be equal to your talent, not your age. At times let the gap between them be embarrassing.