You grew old first not in your own eyes, but in other people's eyes; then, slowly, you agreed with their opinion of you.

The ways in which a book, once read, stays (and changes) in the reader's mind are unpredictable.

Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed.

Did you know that there is no exact rhyme in the Russian language for the word 'pravda'? Ponder and weigh this insufficiency in your mind. Doesn't that just echo down the canyons of your soul?

History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.

The imagination doesn't crop annually like a reliable fruit tree. The writer has to gather whatever's there: sometimes too much, sometimes too little, sometimes nothing at all. And in the years of glut there is always a slatted wooden tray in some cool, dark attic, which the writer nervously visits from time to time; and yes, oh dear, while he's been hard at work downstairs, up in the attic there are puckering skins, warning spots, a sudden brown collapse and the sprouting of snowflakes. What can he do about it?