Russian author (1884-1937)
I am like a machine being driven to excessive rotations: the bearings are incandescing and, in a minute, melted metal will begin to drip and everything will turn to nothing. Quick: get cold water, logic. I am pouring it over myself by the bucketload but the logic sizzles on the hot bearings and dissipates elusive white steam into the air.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
Laughter was the most terrible weapon: you can kill anything with laughter.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
It is common knowledge that a well-bred man should as far as possible have no face. That is to say, not so much be completely without one, but rather, should have a face and yet at the same time appear faceless. It should not stand out, just as a shirt made by a good tailor does not stand out. Needless to say, the face of a well-bred man should be exactly like that of other (well-bred) men and of course in no circumstances whatsoever should it alter. Naturally houses, trees, streets, sky and everything else in the world must satisfy the same conditions to have honor of being known as respectable and well-bred.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
Islanders and the Fisher of Men
The moon hangs alien, heavy, like a lock on a door; the door is tightly shut.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
"The North", The Dragon: Fifteen Stories
You're in a bad way! Apparently, you have developed a soul.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
Darkness. The door into the neighboring room is not quite shut. A strip of light stretches through the crack in the door across the ceiling. People are walking about by lamplight. Something has happened. The strip moves faster and faster and the dark walls move further and further apart, into infinity. This room is London and there are thousands of doors. The lamps dart about and the strips dart across the ceiling. And perhaps it is all delirium ...
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
Islanders and the Fisher of Men
Art functions pyramidally: all new achievements are based on the utilization of everything that has been accumulated below, at the foundations of the pyramid. Revolutions do not occur here; this field, more than any other, is governed by evolution. And we must know what has been done before us in the field of verbal art. This does not mean that you must follow in trodden paths: you must contribute something of your own. A work of art is of value only when it is original, both in content and in form. But in order to leap upward, it is necessary to take off from the ground. It is essential that there be a ground.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
The Psychology of Creative Work
Truth is the first thing that present-day literature lacks. The writer has drowned himself in lies, he is too accustomed to speak prudently, with a careful look over his shoulder.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
The Day and the Age
There is an excellent way to make predictions without the slightest risk of error: predict the past.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
The Future of the Theater
There is no final one; revolutions are infinite.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
The most wonderful thing in life is to be delirious and the most wonderful kind of delirium is being in love.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
Islanders and the Fisher of Men
The inner world: those spiritual apartments to which we are reluctant to admit strangers.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
Maxim Gorky
This is how it must be. I knew it with every nerve, and every hair, and every heartbeat, so sweet it verged on pain. And what joy to submit to this "must." A piece of iron must feel such joy as it submits to the precise, inevitable law that draws it to a magnet. Or a stone, thrown up, hesitating for a moment, then plunging headlong back to earth. Or a man, after the final agony, taking a last deep breath--and dying.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
The knife is the most durable, immortal, the most genius thing that man created. The knife was the guillotine; the knife is the universal means of solving all knots; and along the blade of a knife lies the path of paradox -- the single most worthy path of the fearless mind.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
We comes from God, I from the Devil.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
Knowledge! What does that mean? Your knowledge is nothing but cowardice. No, really, that's all it is. You just want to put a little wall around infinity. And you're afraid to look on the other side of that wall.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
It is not possible to build on negative emotions. Genuine literature will come only when we replace hatred for man with love for man.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
The Goal
Only lifeless mechanisms move along faultlessly straight lines and compass circles. In art the surest way to destroy is to canonize one given form and one philosophy: that which is canonized quickly dies of obesity, of entropy.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
The New Russian Prose
What the self-styled modern artists are doing is a sort of unemotional pseudo-intellectual masturbation ... whereas creative art is more like intercourse, in which the artist must seduce -- render emotional -- his audience, each time.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
We
There are books of the same chemical composition as dynamite. The only difference is that a piece of dynamite explodes once, whereas a book explodes a thousand times.
YEVGENY ZAMYATIN
A Soviet Heretic