I think having an uncompromising ideology eventually forces you out of the norm.

Nothing is easy in writing. I don't think for anyone. But dialogue is probably what comes most naturally to me.

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.

Incident at Vichy, one of my favorite Arthur Miller plays, is a play in which you look at all of the different perspectives of this moral question. And it isn't so easy to decide which position is correct.

I spent seven years writing The Free World. There are a lot of things I accomplished there that I'm very proud of, but I didn't want to spend another seven years writing a book like that.

I believe I'm very conscious of exactly what I'm doing. I'm auditioning lines of dialogue, and I'm interrogating whether the lines would translate from Russian into English the right way. The English that results can perhaps seem somewhat more formal than colloquial, but not so formal as to feel academic.

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.