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.

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

If my mother hadn't tried to sell me chicken Kiev cutlets for $1.40 after I graduated from college, maybe I would've been the lawyer she wanted me to be.

In America, the distance between wanting something and having it delivered to your living room is not terribly great.

You could drown a kitten in her blue eyes.

My parents were constantly afraid they would lose their jobs. The idea that we were always a paycheck away from disaster was drilled into me.

Asthmatic immigrant learns to breathe by writing.