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.

We are taught that we can be better than we are. But is there a limit to how good we can be?

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.

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

We all have some ideological quotient in ourselves. And I think it does guide who we are.

In my experience of women, women have a greater capacity. Maybe women, even very pragmatic ones, are less guarded about showing emotions.

When you write a book, you want to have fidelity to the character. Characters and their emotions guide the structure of the novel. The author is aware that there's a certain amount of information she/he has to provide in order to satisfy the reader, knowing that she/he has set something up that must be paid off, but this payment must be made while maintaining fidelity to the characters.