I always think that good writers should be growing up on the brink of death - it really lets them see mortality very clearly.

Life for young American college graduates is a festive affair. Free of having to support their families, they mostly have gay parties on rooftops where they reflect at length upon their quirky electronic childhoods and sometimes kiss each other on the lips and neck.

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

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

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

Do not throw away your heart. Keep your heart. Your heart is all that matters ... Throw away your ancestors! ... Throw away your shyness and the anger that lies just a few inches beneath ... Accept the truth! And if there is more than one truth, then learn to do the difficult work -- learn to choose. You are good enough, you are HUMAN ENOUGH, to choose!

We're people of the Orient. We know everything. And what we don't know, we can sense.