Also, I've spent an entire week without reading any books or talking about them too loudly. I'm learning to work my apparat's screen, the colourful pulsating mosaic of it, the fact that it knows every last stinking detail about the world, whereas my books only know the minds of their authors.

On that night I was left with only the truth that nothing of our personality survives after death, that in the end all that was Misha Vainberg would evaporate along with the styles and delusions of his epoch, leaving behind not one flutter of his sad heavy brilliance, not one damp spot around which his successors could congregate to appreciate his life and times.

I love librarians more than any other people in the world. When I was an immigrant kid, they’ve made me feel like a human being and they gave me books that taught me English.

Michigan, with its delicious American name. How lucky one must be to live there.

The radio station was playing Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, a sure sign that things were much worse than they appeared.

I am born hungry. Ravenous. I want to eat the world, and I can never be satiated.

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