If you stop thinking, if you stop wondering, you die.

My mother cranes her neck. Her ability to be fascinated by things is her best gift to me.

Silence has been destroyed, but also the idea that it's important to learn how another person thinks, to enter the mind of another person. The whole idea of empathy is gone. We are now part of this giant machine where every second we have to take out a device and contribute our thoughts and opinions.

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

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

Reading is difficult. People just aren't meant to read anymore. We're in a post-literate age. You know, a visual age. How many years after the fall of Rome did it take for a Dante to appear? Many, many years.

I write five, six days a week. The thing is capturing the voice. I feel like I've been perfecting one voice - in different iterations, sure, but the Russian-ness has always been the undercurrent.