The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even - if you will - eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with.

In Russia, the moment a person opens his mouth you know where he's from. There's the uniformity of experience of an individual in Russia. When you're about 7 years old you get into school and you get put in this factory or this bureaucracy or whatever. The options are computable. Here it's tremendously diverse.

I grew up in the sort of cultural milieu that always regarded conversations about the political discourse as tremendously low-brow.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

I always adhered to the idea that God is time, or at least that His spirit is.

If they had wanted to punish me, they should have kept me in a communal apartment. Then I would have become a wreck.

I don't want to dive into that mud slide, which is what I consider the literary process.