There's this American pretense, which is the pretense of the journalist with the view from nowhere - which has somehow morphed into the journalist who was born this morning. So, he doesn't know that Donald Trump lied yesterday, and the day before. So, he concludes that he doesn't know whether Trump lied accidentally or on purpose. You can only pretend not to know that if you don't know that he lied yesterday, and the day before. So, to my mind when NPR says they don't know if he's intentionally lying, they're lying. We have to be smarter about it.

Pussy Riot have certainly changed some people's assumptions about the role of political art and the relationship between the intelligentsia and the church. That's a hell of a lot to do in a forty-second performance.

It's not natural for people in the opposition to leave. It's always a personal catastrophe.

One of the most famous lines in contemporary Russian poetry is "Erica makes four copies and that's enough." That's the ethos we're aiming for. This is not to say I don't want lots of people to read my book, I do. I especially want people to read it who will feel better, and safer, or at least understood.

You risk everything if you so much as join a legal protest demonstration in Russia. It raises the stakes.

... fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there-because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie. The institution of marriage is going to change, and it should change. And again, I don't think it should exist.

There are several dozen political prisoners in Russia. When I cite that number people are often very surprised. They often think there are more. Well - there are hundreds of thousands of people who haven't had a fair trial, who are victims of the political system. But in the Amnesty International sense of the word, most of them are not political prisoners because they are not going to prison for protesting.