People always write on my Facebook that they've seen somebody they thought was me on the subway, and I was cursing badly.

Every returning New Yorker asks the question: Is this still my city? I have a ready answer, cloaked in obstinate despair: It is. And if it's not, I will love it all the more. I will love it to the point where it becomes mine again.

The greatest books in Russian literature are satires. Gogol's Dead Souls, for example, is a very over-the-top satire about life in Russia. I think it's the thing we do best.

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

Reading is entering into the consciousness of another human being.

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.

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.