Цитаты из книги The Assistant Producer

There was nothing of your popular Russian general about him, nothing of that good, burly, popeyed,. thick-necked sort. He was lean, frail, with sharp features, a clipped. mustache, and the kind of haircut that is called by Russians "hedgehog": short, wiry, upright, and compact.

We have a saying in Russian: vsevo dvoe i est; smert' da sovest'-- which may be rendered thus: "There are only two things that really exist-- one's death and one's conscience." The lovely thing about humanity is that at times one may be unaware of doing right, but one is always aware of doing wrong.

Golubkov was not only a very versatile spy (a triple agent to be exact); he was also an exceedingly ambitious little fellow. Why the vision of presiding over an organization that was but a sunset behind a cemetery happened to be so dear to him is a conundrum only for those who have no hobbies or passions.

A White soldier's dead hand is still clutching a medallion with his mother's face. A Red soldier nearby has on his shattered breast a letter from home with the same old woman blinking through the dissolving lines.

In Feodor Chaliapin's dressing room there hung a photograph of her: Russian headgear with pearls, hand propping cheek, dazzling teeth between fleshy lips

Meaning? well, because sometimes life is merely that-- an Assistant Producer.

The mirrors of possibility cannot replace the eyehole of knowledge.

German film companies, which kept sprouting like poisonous mushrooms in those days (just before the child of light learned to talk), found cheap labor in hiring those among the Russian emigres whose only hope and profession was their past-- that is, a set of totally unreal people-- to represent "real" audiences in pictures.