What is the past, after all, but a vast sheet of darkness in which a few moments, pricked apparently at random, shine?

School is where you go between when your parents can't take you and industry can't take you.

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?

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

We are fated to love one another; we hardly exist outside our love, we are just animals without it, with a birth and a death and constant fear between. Our love has lifted us up , out of the dreadfulness of merely living.

Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot.

Fiction is very greedy. It will take all you know and then some. The first novel I tried to write, I was struck by this - the appetite of the blank page for ever more information, ever more data. An empty book is a greedy thing. You are right: You wind up using everything you know, and often more than once.