You are not what you want. You are what wants you back.

If I still lived in Russia, I'd be dead... or a really effective oligarch.

Asthmatic immigrant learns to breathe by writing.

Then I celebrated my Wall of Books. I counted the volumes on my twenty-foot-long modernist bookshelf to make sure none had been misplaced or used as kindling by my subtenant. “You’re my sacred ones,” I told the books. “No one but me still cares about you. But I’m going to keep you with me forever. And one day I’ll make you important again.” I thought about that terrible calumny of the new generation: that books smell.

She took my hand and pulled me after her, her shoulders giving off a sweet peppermint concoction that the bodies of young women sometimes produce to make my life more difficult.

A writer or any suffering artist-to-be is just an instrument too finely set to the human condition [...]

Before my first novel, I was dating a woman who later went to prison for bashing a guy with a hammer.