“Better not sit on a hedgehog if you’re naked.” ~ Russian Author Mikhail Bulgakov ~ The White Guard 1925”

“My digestion is not mocked!" boomed the Russian. "Nor will I stand idly while Miss Larouche is insulted! You are banished, hedgehog! My digestion has spoken-BEGONE!”

“By the time I got to high school, I had learned to be more cautious about revealing my dreams. I was reading—and therefore writing—adventure stories. This was before I’d read Isak Dinesen and Mikhail Bulgakov, before Ernest Hemingway and T. Coraghessan Boyle, before I’d read something and really felt it, when writing was still just a compulsion, and my teen-age brain was only bordering on sentience. I filled pages of white space with swashbuckling, rapier-wielding, sidekick-sacrificing, dragon-baiting romance.(from 'High-School Confidential' in the The New Yorker.)”

“Like a White Russian drinking tea in Paris, marooned in the twentieth century, I wander back, try to regain hose distant pathways; I become too maudlin, lose myself. Weep...I sit in the chair and ooze like a sponge.”

“I saw a white toilet, with no plumbing, alone in a field of snow. Well, almost alone. There were two naked albinos and a polar bear sitting on it, and I felt inspired to write a love poem.”

“One of the most brilliant Russian writers of the twentieth century, Yevgeny Zamyatin belongs to the tradition in Russian literature represented by Gogol, Leskov, Bely, Remizov, and, in certain aspects of their work, also by Babel and Bulgakov. It is a tradition, paradoxically, of experimenters and innovators. Perhaps the principal quality that unites them is their approach to reality and its uses in art - the refusal to be bound by literal fact, the interweaving of reality and fantasy, the transmutation of fact into poetry, often grotesque, oblique, playful, but always expressive of the writer's unique vision of life in his own, unique terms.”