Sergei Dovlatov Quotes

#1. If you see something working for someone else, and you are in the same business, more than likely it will work for you.

Ehab Atalla

#2. Stop thinking. I've stopped some 15 years ago. Otherwise, if you will be thinking you won't want to live. Everyone who thinks is unhappy.

Sergei Dovlatov

#3. A Russian drunk is a fascinating creature. Even when he has money, he still prefers poison at a rouble forty. And he won't take the change.

Sergei Dovlatov

#4. The world in which I found myself was horrifying. In that world, people fought with sharpened rasp files, ate dogs, covered their faces with tattoos and sodomized goats. In that world, people killed for a package of tea.

Sergei Dovlatov

#5. Looking around, do you see ruins? That was to be expected. He who lives in the world of words does not get along with things.

Sergei Dovlatov

#6. Where love commands, the impossible concedes.

Alireza Salehi Nejad

#7. Chamberlain's visit to Hitler today may bring things to a head or may result in a temporary postponement of what looks to me likean inevitable conflict within the next five years.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#8. I had three long conversations with Marusya over a cup of coffee. She told me her whole rather silly story. To some degree we became friends. I like people like that
doomed, dying, helpless, and brazen. I always say, if you're in trouble, you're not sinning.

Sergei Dovlatov

#9. Every single of us is going to be saying, "Thank God, finally, an interesting convention." But you're right about all those people out there. All the people who have been energized by the Trump campaign are going to be very, very angry folk if they think that Trump is not well treated.

Ted Koppel

#10. Most people consider problems whose solutions don't suit them to be insoluble.
And they constantly ask questions to which they don't need truthful answers.

Sergei Dovlatov

#11. As a schoolboy I liked to draw the leaders of the world proletariat - especially Marx. Just start smearing an ordinary splotch of ink around and you've already got a resemblance ...

Sergei Dovlatov

#12. I decided to "find myself" in monumental sculpture. Alas, monumental sculpture is a very conservative genre. The cause is the monumentality itself. You can secretly write novels and symphonies. You can secretly experiment on canvas. But just try to hide a twelve-foot-high sculpture!

Sergei Dovlatov

#13. We are not better than native born Americans, and of course not smarter. We've just been to the last stop of this bus.

Sergei Dovlatov

#14. Let's assume there really is no such thing as happiness, no such thing as peace, and no freedom either. But there are kind of attacks of senseless ecstasy. Can this be me?

Sergei Dovlatov

#15. Sales were lukewarm. Back home there was no freedom, but there were readers. Here there was freedom enough, but readers were missing.

Sergei Dovlatov

#16. Don't think love has sizes. It either is or isn't

Sergei Dovlatov

#17. You can divide the world into the two kinds of people: those who ask, and those who answer. Those who pose questions, and those who frown in irritation in response.

Sergei Dovlatov

#18. In mythic terms, the earth is a place of mystery and wonder where life always hangs by a thread and
all the events of history are loosely stitched upon the endless loom of eternity. Secretly, we are each tied to the divine.

Michael Meade

#19. I looked at the empty suitcase. On the bottom was Karl Marx. On the lid was Brodsky. And between them, my lost, precious, only life.

Sergei Dovlatov

#20. If Hemingway is to believed, poverty is an invaluable school for a writer. Poverty makes a man clear-sighted. And so on. It's interesting that Hemingway realized this only when he became rich.

Sergei Dovlatov

#21. Our life is but a grain of sand in the indifferent ocean of infinity.

Sergei Dovlatov

#22. We didn't raise our daughter, we merely loved her.

Sergei Dovlatov

#23. There's a reason every book, even one that isn't very serious, is shaped like a suitcase

Sergei Dovlatov

#24. The world was horrible. But life continued. What is more, life's usual proportions stayed the same. The ratio of good and evil, grief and happiness, remained unchanged.

Sergei Dovlatov

#25. I'm not interested in popular culture, particularly. I'm not against it, I'm not avoiding it, but I'm not interested in it as a force in life.

Joe Bradley

#26. The day was cold but sunny. The city was decorated with holiday flags.

Sergei Dovlatov

#27. I came from the gutter and i rose into a flower

Rayvon L. Browne

#28. The university campus was in the old part of town. The combination of water and stone creates a special, majestic atmosphere there. It's hard to be a sluggard under those circumstances, but I managed.

Sergei Dovlatov

#29. No point in arguing. But of course I argued.

Sergei Dovlatov

#30. If people are rude in Moscow, at least it's in Russian.

Sergei Dovlatov