Victor Pelevin Quotes

“Reading is human contact, and the range of our human contacts is what makes us what we are. Just imagine you live the life of a long-distance truck driver. The books that you read are like the travelers you take into your cab. If you give lifts to people who are cultured and profound, you'll learn a lot from them. If you pick up fools, you'll turn into a fool yourself.”

— Victor Pelevin

In order for him to believe sincerely in eternity, others had to share in this belief, because a belief that no one else shares is called schizophrenia.

— Victor Pelevin

“How can non-existence get sick of itself?
Everytime you wake up, you appear again out of nowhere. And so does everything else. Death just means the replacement of the usual morning waking with something else, something quite impossible even to think about. We don't even have the instrument to do it, because our mind & our world are the same thing.”

— Victor Pelevin

“Of course, you don't turn into a shit just because you buy a Mercedes-600. It's the other way round: the reason you can afford to buy a Mercedes-600 is that you turn into a shit.”

— Victor Pelevin

“There's a scientific hypothesis that every person's name is a primary suggestive command that contains the entire script of their life in highly concentrated form ... According to this point of view, there is only a limited number of names, because society only needs a limited number of human types. Just a few models of worker and warrior ants, if I could put it like that. And everybody's psyche is preprogrammed at a basic level by the associative semantic fields that their first name and surname activate.”

— Victor Pelevin

“I want to find my golden joy," I said.
The baron laughed loudly. "Splendid," he said. "But what does that mean to you
your golden joy?"
"The golden joy," I replied, "is when a peculiar flight of free thought makes it possible to see the beauty of life. Am I making myself clear?”

— Victor Pelevin

“The USSR, which they'd begun to renovate and improve at
about the time when Tatarsky decided to change his profession, improved so
much that it ceased to exist (if a state is capable of entering nirvana,
that's what must have happened in this case)”

— Victor Pelevin

“Ludwig Wittgenstein once said that names are the only things that exist in the world. Maybe that's true, but the problem is that as time passes by, names do not remain the same - even if they don't change.”

— Victor Pelevin

“I had a dreary, depressed feeling so deep in my soul that I was almost ready to believe I had one.”

— Victor Pelevin

“What are they but the voice of history multiplied by millions of televisions?”

— Victor Pelevin

“An inverted five-pointed star. The humans don't understand it correctly. They draw a goat's head into it with the horns at the top. They like to see the devil everywhere, except in the mirror and on TV.”

— Victor Pelevin

The Eskimos have thirty words for describing different kinds of snow, and modern Russian has about the same number of expressions to describe giving a bribe to a state official.

— Victor Pelevin

“I was surrounded on all sides by the indifferent torpidity of summer, somewhere there were dogs barking lazily, while the machine-gun barrel of the sun was strafing the earth in a continuous, never-ending burst of fire.”

— Victor Pelevin

“There's obviously some strange correspondence between the general outline of a life and that stream of petty events in which a person is constantly involved and regards as insignificant.”

— Victor Pelevin

“IsoldA: The only way to be alone is to behave as though we are alone already.”

— Victor Pelevin

“In the area of radical youth culture nothing sells as well as well-packaged and politically correct rebellion against a world that is ruled by political correctness and in which everything is packaged to be sold.”

— Victor Pelevin

“My youthful dreams of the future were born from the gentle sadness of those evenings, far removed from the rest of life, when you lie in the grass beside the remains of someone else's campfire, with your bicycle beside you, watching the purple stripes left in the western sky by the sun that has just set, and you can see the first stars in the east.”

— Victor Pelevin

“Comrades in the struggle! The position of modern man is not merely lamentable; one might even say that there is no condition, because man hardly exists. Nothing exists to which one could point and say: 'There, that is Homo Zapiens.' HZ is simply the residual luminescence of a soul fallen asleep; it is a film about the shooting of another film, shown on a television in an empty house.”

— Victor Pelevin

“But the most terrible thing was that the shame didn't simply sear my heart, it also mingled into a single whole with the pleasure I was getting from what was going on.
It was something quite unimaginable - truly beyond good and evil. It was then that I finally understood the fatal abysses trodden by De Sade and Sacher-Masoch, who I had always thought absurdly pompous. No, they weren't absurd at all - they simply hadn't been able to find the right words to convey the true nature of their nightmares. And I knew why - there were no such words in any human language.
'Stop,' I whispered through my tears.
But in heart I didn't know what I wanted - for him to stop or to carry on.
I couldn't hold back any longer and I started crying. But they were tears of pleasure, a monstrous, shameful pleasure that was too enthralling to be abandoned voluntarily.”

— Victor Pelevin

“Gazing at the faces of the horses and the people, at this boundless stream of life raised up by the power of my will and now hurtling into nowhere across the sunset-crimson steppe, I often think: where am I in this flux? GHENGIS KHAN”

— Victor Pelevin

“It's a miserable thing to leave behind a world which still holds secrets. I”

— Victor Pelevin

“But since I realised that peace and freedom were unattainable on earth, my spirit aspired aloft, and everything that my chosen path required ceased to conflict with my conscience, because my conscience was calling me out into space, and was not much interested in what was happening on earth.”

— Victor Pelevin

“In itself a wall on which a panoramic view of a non-existent world is drawn does not change. But for a great deal of money you can buy a view from the window with a painted sun, a sky-blue bay and a calm evening. Unfortunately the author of this fragment will again be Ed-but even this is not important, because the very window the view is bought for is also only drawn in. Then perhaps the wall on which it is drawn is a drawing too? But drawn by whom and on what?
He raised his eyes to the wall of the toilet as though in hopes of an answer there. Traced on the tiles in red felt-tip pen were the jolly, rounded letters of a brief slogan: Trapped? Masturbate!”

— Victor Pelevin

“Where are they all going? What for? Do they never hear the rhythm of the wheels or see the bare plains outside the windows? They know everything there is to know about this life, but they still move on along the corridor, from the W.C. to their compartment, from the lobby to the restaurant, gradually transforming today into one more yesterday, and they think that a God exists who will reward them or punish them for it.”

— Victor Pelevin

“You should know, my son, that that's what heroism is all about. No one's ever ready to be a hero-there's no way to prepare for it. Of course, you can practise till you're really good at running up to the gunport and have the knack of falling neatly across it on your chest-we teach all of that. But you can't teach anyone the actual inner act of heroism, it can only be performed. The more you wanted to live before, the better for the act of heroic sacrifice.”

— Victor Pelevin

“In early childhood (as, perhaps, after death) a person extends in all directions at the same time, so we can say he still doesn't exist yet- the personality comes into being later, when an attachment to some particular direction appears.”

— Victor Pelevin

[P]erhaps the burrows in which our lives were spent really were dark and dirty, and perhaps we ourselves were well suited to these burrows, but in the blue sky above our heads, up among the thinly scattered stars, there were special, artificial points of gleaming light, creeping unhurriedly through the constellations, points created here out of steel, semiconductors, and electricity, and now flying through space. And every one of us, even the blue-faced alcoholic we had passed on the way here, huddling like a toad in a snowdrift, even Mitiok's brother, and of course Mitiok and I - we all had our own little embassy up there in the cold pure blueness.

— Victor Pelevin

“After walking round the statue and admiring the firm, reliable backside of the Party's loudmouth, Tatarsky finally realized that depression had invaded his soul. There were two ways he could get rid of it - down a hundred grammes of vodka, or spend about a hundred dollars on buying something immediately (some time ago Tatarsky had realized with astonishment that the two actions evoked a similar state of light euphoria lasting for an hour to an hour and a half).”

— Victor Pelevin

“We're taking a ride down the Kashirksy Highway”

— Victor Pelevin

Because from the first line I can tell how many hours the mule was carrying it up his ass on the way from Colombo to Minsk. And that's nothing, I can know how many times that ass of his was ...

— Victor Pelevin

“There are no philosophical problems, there is only a suite of interconnected linguistic cul de sacs created by language's inability to reflect the truth.”

— Victor Pelevin

“The author's opinions do not necessarily coincide with his point of view.”

— Victor Pelevin