Shura, I’m yours. You may not like it today, you may not want it tonight, you may wish for it all to be different now, but it remains, and I remain, as always, only yours. Nothing can change that. Not your wrath, your fists, your body or your death.

Courage, Alexander..... Courage, Tatiana

If there is God, I thought...Please some day let me make love to this girl while she wears that dress." "Oh..." "Tatiasha...isn't it nice to know there is a God?

We’ll meet again in Lvov, my love and I…” Tatiana hums, eating her ice cream, in our Leningrad, in jasmine June, near Fontanka, the Neva, the Summer Garden, where we are forever young.

Courage, Alexan­der,” she whis­pered. “Courage, Ta­tiana.

There is a very definite Russian heart in me; that never dies. I think you're born and you live your life with it and you die with it. I'm very much an American - my books tend to be about American things, but inside there's that sort of tortured, long-suffering, aching, constantly analysing Russian soul underneath the happy American exterior.

I tend to be a great optimist when it comes to the United States and the American way of life, I think precisely because I wasn't born into it.