Quotes from Andrey Kurkov

It was foolish to worry about time, of course. Time plays a role when there's someone to keep track of it, to depend on it. And if no-one like that remains, then time, too, stops and disappears.

Only in Italy are elections as carnivalesque as they are here. Except, in Ukraine, the carnival is always anarchistic, and more or less uncontrollable.

Misha had appeared chez Viktor a year before, when the zoo was giving hungry animals away to anyone able to feed them. Viktor had gone along and returned with a king penguin. Abandoned by his girlfriend the week before, he had been feeling lonely. But Misha had brought his own kind of loneliness, and the result was now two complementary lonelinesses, creating an impression more of interdependence than of amity.

Misha plip-plopping behind him.

A new morning was dawning grey outside the window.

Your interest lies in not asking questions," he said quietly. "Think what you like. But bear in mind this: the moment you are told what the point of your work is, you're dead. This isn't a film, it's for real. The full story is what you get told only if and when your work, and with it your existence, are no longer required." He smiled a sad smile. "Still, I do, in fact, wish you well. Believe me.

In politics there is nothing simpler than simply talking, and nothing more complicated than simply acting.

Sergeyich struck a match - and the sound of it also blended into the silence, becoming its property, an integral part of it, a note in its endless music.

On 4 March, Yuriy Kravchenko was found dead in his dacha. Official verdict: suicide. In spite of the fact that Kravchenko was killed by two bullets in his head.

Drink up!" urged the Chief. "There's no escaping fate. Drink while the champagne lasts!

Lass uns trinken, auf dass es uns nicht schlechter gehe. Besser ging's uns ja schon mal.

Let's drink to not being worse off. We have known better days.

Europe, so vociferous in her support during the Maidan protests, has subsequently fallen silent and walked away, preferring to profit from trade with Russia. Money matters more than democracy.

The pure and sinless did not exist, or else died unnoticed and with no obituary. The idea seemed persuasive. Those who merited obituaries had usually achieved things, fought for their ideals, and when locked in battle, it wasn't easy to remain entirely honest and upright. Today's battles were all for material gain, anyway. The crazy idealist was extinct – survived by the crazy pragmatist Ã¢â'¬Â¦

Inna Bohoslovska is scaring everyone by repeating that Putin wants war.

I will have to pay more attention to Russian weather forecasts in future, to check that Kiev, Warsaw, Riga and Vilnius are not included in their maps.

I don't think the warriors will be prosecuted. These young fantasy enthusiasts are the most exotic armed group of the Eurorevolution. They appeared in the Maidan in December, wielding wooden swords and shields, and at first brought a carnival atmosphere to the demonstrations. They distinguished themselves during confrontations with the Berkut. Later, their ranks were thinned out by snipers. Some were killed, others wounded. And the only thing that remains exotic about them is their name.

The past believed in dates. And everyone's life consisted of dates, giving life a rhythm and sense of gradation, as if from the eminence of a date one could look back and down, and see the past itself. A clear, comprehensible past, divided up into squares of events, lines of paths taken.

Yesterday, Parliament announced an open forum day. Everyone was given the chance to speak. Or, in other words, no one listened.

Life was a road, and if departed from at a tangent, the longer for it. And a long road was a long life - a case where to travel was better than to arrive, the point of arrival being, after all, always the same: death.

After all, bees alone had managed to establish communism in their hives, thanks to their orderliness and labour. Ants, on the other hand, had only reached the stage of real, natural socialism; this was because they had nothing to produce, and so had merely mastered order and equality. But people? People had neither order nor equality. Even their police were useless, just loafing around by the fence

The silence grew louder, more evident. One could stroke it, as one would a cat or a dog; it was warm, and it brushed up against Sergeyich gently, pleading for his involvement, his participation in its life, its sounds.

In one of my novels I described a secret factory, hidden away in the Ural Mountains, which produced artificial meteorites. The dream of the Soviet military's high command: bombarding the United States with artificial meteorites, while making people believe they were real ones.

Somewhere far off a cannon sounded. Half a minute later there was another blast, which seemed to come from the opposite direction. Fools can't get to sleep, Sergeyich said to himself. Probably just warming their hands.