Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko

To believe in one's dreams is to spend all of one's life asleep.

A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else can be only a footnote.

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.

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.

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

In any man who dies there dies with him, his first snow and kiss and fight... Not people die but worlds die in them.

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

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