God knows our despair. God wants His chosen people to live in peace. God loves life, cares less about death. We need to live. I want to live, I want my children to live. Everyone I know wants to live. You have to ask yourself what is more important to you, life is death. What is this world about - life or death?

I want to change something. I want to stop the germs from attacking my daughters.

There's no bad writing; you did something. I was operating inside language, and I did something. I'm not ashamed of it.

I've read books in school that were written by ideological rote - they were brainwashers. Therefore, any art, any literature, that has a clearly defined political goal is repellent to me.

Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love.

I read everything I could find in English - Twain, Henry James, Hemingway, really everything. And then after a while I started writing shorter pieces in English, and one of them got published in a literary magazine and that's how it got started. After that, graduate school didn't seem very important.

Our daughter was born in Chicago, and she's already showing it. The temperature has to be approaching zero for her to wear a hat.