When writing dialogue, I hear it in both Russian and English, and try to find a language that combines the two.

It's not for the writer to say whether the thing is successful or not.

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.

Language is a personality as well. People are different when they speak different languages.

When writing dialogue, I hear it in both Russian and English, and try to find a language that combines the two.

Most people will reach a point where, whatever their ideology, they will relent, or conform, and that keeps them kind of in the general mass of people. And for those who find that they can't, all of sudden they leave the general mass, they find that they become exceptions, and exceptional, and often this makes them public.

Here I am: a Russian-speaking Jew living in Canada, and you, an Indian ex-patriot living in San Francisco. All of a sudden we commune in this moment about a much older Russian political dissident.That's the human part of being human: feeling those moments.