Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.

My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.

Russia is the only country of the world you can be homesick for while you're still in it.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

In a country this large and a language even larger ... there ought to be a living for somebody who cares and wants to entertain and instruct a reader.

Each day, we wake slightly altered, and the person we were yesterday is dead. So why, one could say, be afraid of death, when death comes all the time?

You cannot but learn more of the world's heft, as you take it now into your hands.