You risk everything if you so much as join a legal protest demonstration in Russia. It raises the stakes.

When you lose your freedom, you lose, first and foremost, the opportunity to choose the company you keep.

When you're part of the opposition you want to stay. It's part of your identity. You're useless if you leave. You feel like you have failed.

Putin needed an enemy, an Other, against which to mobilize. LGBT people are really convenient: we're sort of the ultimate foreign agent.

It's not natural for people in the opposition to leave. It's always a personal catastrophe.

A law is always that much more scary and that much more effective for a totalitarian state if it's selectively enforced.

One of the things that I really value about Russian culture is that on the private level it allows for a huge amount of variety and individuality with regards to family structure.

It turned out that capitalism alone could make people not only rich and happy but also poor, hungry, miserable, and powerless.

But why always think the worst of people? What would she be doing to herself if she adopted that attitude to life? It was better to think the best and be wrong than to think the worst and be wrong.

A slight concussion of the brain simplifies matters so beautifully.("Three O'Clock")

You are as free as a prisoner in an open air prison

Mix carefully truth and deceit, you have politics

True architecture exists only where man stands in the center.

The paintings are transferred from my computer to a disk, and I can hand it to the printer this way; or I can modem the painting to the printer over the phone lines from my house in Hawaii.

A man kills the thing he loves, and he must die a little himself.

I think if we open ourselves to all different kinds of men and all groups, we find a lot more opportunities to love.

To serve the Queen of Heaven is already to reign there, and to live under her commands is more than to govern.

Stories are like birds flying, here and gone in a moment.