The vocation of each writer is to describe the world as he or she sees it; anything more than that is advertising.

Anna Karenina is just a story about a woman falling in love with a bloke who is not her husband. Its gossip, rubbish - on the other hand, its the deepest story there could be about social transgression, about love, betrayal, duty, children.

These days everyone was insisting on their identity, coming out as a man, woman, gay, black, Jew - brandishing whichever features they could claim, as if without a tag they wouldn’t be human.

Please remove your watch,' he said. 'In my domain time isn't a factor.

How disturbing it is that our illusions are often our most important beliefs.

At the same time, you have to find the right distance between people. Too close, and they overwhelm you, too far and they abandon you. How to hold them in the right relation?

But in love each moment is magnified, and every gesture, word and syllable is examined like a speech by the President.