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

People everywhere feel differently at different times of their lives.

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

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.

When you write a book, you want to have fidelity to the character. Characters and their emotions guide the structure of the novel.

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.

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.