"Sometimes it is necessary to be alone to think."

"My grandfather was a cook for Lenin and Stalin. So I have a good genetic connection to power."

"I sometimes think that Russians and Americans have a common problem—we don’t know how to relax."

"One has to be insincere and promise something which you cannot fulfill. So you either have to be a fool who does not understand what you are promising, or deliberately be lying."

"The strengthening of our statehood is, at times, deliberately interpreted as authoritarianism."