If you're not fascinated by Korea yet, you damn well should be. The most innovative country on earth deserves a hilarious and poignant account on the order of Euny Hong's The Birth of Korean Cool. Her phat beats got Gangnam Style and then some.

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

Usually, with a novel, you start with no idea what to do because your job is to create convincing characters and then they just run around getting crazy. The problem with writing a memoir, obviously, is you can't do that because you sort of know what's going to happen. Because you're the character.

A lot of the ways of advertising a book - the cover, whether somebody sees it on a subway or sees it in a bookstore - those things are going to rapidly diminish as we move to an electronic model.

I write almost entirely in bed or on a couch with my feet up on the coffee table. I feel most creative when Im looking out the window, and my bed and couch have nice views of the New York skyline.

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

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