From the Quotation of the day mailing list, 2008-02-26:
"The citizen lives in each of us. In the days of Brezhnev, Andropov, Gorbachev and Yeltsin, I was constantly trying to suppress the responsible citizen in me. I told myself that I was, after all, an artist. As a storyteller I was influenced by the Moscow underground, where it was common to be apolitical. This was one of our favorite anecdotes: As German troops marched into Paris, Picasso sat there and drew an apple. That was our attitude -- you must sit there and draw your apple, no matter what happens around you. I held fast to that principle until I was 50. Now the citizen in me has come to life." -- Vladimir Sorokin, Russian author, discussing why he felt the need to write his novel "Day of the Oprichnik", which portrays an authoritarian Russia ruled by members of the secret police.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/spie
gel/0,1518,463860,00.html]
(submitted to the mailing list by Terry Labach)