A poet's autobiography is his poetry. Anything else is just a footnote.
– Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Envy is an insult to oneself.
– Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Give me a mystery - just a plain and simple one - a mystery which is diffidence and silence, a slim little bare-foot mystery: give me a mystery - just one!
– Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Great twentieth century: sputnik century: what an angst is in you, what wide perplexity! You are a good century and a century of the pit, cannibal century to the ideas you beget, century of the angry young men's target.
– Yevgeny Yevtushenko
He who is conceived in a cage yearns for the cage.
– Yevgeny Yevtushenko
In any man who dies there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight. Not people die but worlds die in them.
– Yevgeny Yevtushenko
In my blood there is no Jewish blood. In their callous rage, all anti-Semites must hate me now as a Jew. For that reason I am a true Russian.
– Yevgeny Yevtushenko
No, Stalin did not die. He thinks that death can be fixed. We removed him from the mausoleum. But how do we remove Stalin from Stalin's heirs?
– Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Why is it that right-wing bastards always stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity, while liberals fall out among themselves?
– Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Time has a way of demonstrating that the most stubborn are the most intelligent.
– Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Sorrow happens, hardship happens, the hell with it, who never knew the price of happiness, will not be happy.