Sometimes I don't write at all. Someone once asked me, "What do you do when you're not writing?" And I said, "I idle."

If you find yourself as a person in unfamiliar territory, you will grasp on to what is already familiar.

The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.

I like the idea of a book being a democratic space which readers enter, carrying their own thoughts, and participate in a conversation, or experience of grace.

Europe has never been a monolithic space, it contains a lot of people, a lot of languages and infinite supplies of history. I didn't need to do anything to showcase diversity. It is a condition of life and art in Europe, contained in every random sample.

I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.

A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.