I think ex-Soviet or Russian-Jewish women are tougher and that comes through. And if they are more pragmatic than the men, it's because they are obliged to be. They have all the female responsibilities and all the male responsibilities.

Some is, I think, the personal in any act of writing. You find yourself caught up: you start a sentence, and it becomes revelatory, not just of the character, but of you as well.

I think every book is a reaction to everything you're written before, and most immediately to the book you wrote just before.

There are books like Darkness at Noon, which from the prose standpoint I don't think is a perfect book. It has flaws. But for its time, it was very politically courageous.

I think there are differences between men and women. There is more of a softness to women than there is to men, especially when it comes to those more intimate emotions: feeling love, feeling familial connections.

Writing a novel, in an unplanned and unpredictable way, makes you engaged; it takes you into yourself, and it becomes something between you and the character for a moment, and then you move back into the structure of the book. I love those moments, because they are completely unbidden.

There are different types of readers. People draw lines at which three things intersect: the character, the author, and the reader.