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

I'm bright, but there are lots of bright writers and people everywhere. In no way, at no point do I think I'm better than them.

Where can you go from nowhere, except deeper into nowhere?

To write has to be related to a drive inside.

Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.

The privilege of a middle-class, stable, bourgeois life is that you can pretend that you are not complicated and project yourself as a solid, uncomplicated person, with refined life goals and achievements.

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.