It was like passing the scene of a highway accident and being relieved to learn that nobody had been seriously injured.

As a novelist, I tell stories and people give me money. Then financial planners tell me stories and I give them money.

The great thing about being a writer is that you are always recreating yourself.

Of course the biggest mafia in Russia has always been the government; in Soviet times, the Communist Party, and now a circle of former KGB and FSB.

You have to be an outsider to write.

Then there was the whole concept of coal mining, which is a culture unto itself, the most dangerous occupation in the world, and which draws and develops a certain kind of man.

The most beautiful women in the world were African.