Who says you cannot hold the moon in your hand? Tonight when the stars come out and the moon rises in the velvet sky, look outside your window, then raise your hand and position your fingers around the disk of light. There you go . . . That was easy!

I would say it was [ifluence] all the Greeks and the Russian classics like [Lev] Tolstoy, [Andrey] Goncharov,[Fedor] Dostoyevsky, [Alexander] Pushkin, and the international classics in Russian translation like Victor Hugo, George Sand, Charlotte Bronte, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain.

Creativity is not so much a boundless well, but an all-you-can-eat buffet of elements for your creative endeavor. Eventually you've eaten your fill, and it's time to digest and then make something. But at some point, it will be time to return to the restaurant.

Respect the young and chastise your elders. It's about time the world was set aright.

We don't need fantasy to mess with our minds to the point of rendering us insane - real life horrors do that already.

I am a novelist at heart.

A great ancient poet was blind. A great classical composer was deaf. Many of us are dumb. What have we to show for it?