If they had wanted to punish me, they should have kept me in a communal apartment. Then I would have become a wreck.

Cherish your human connections: your relationships with friends and family.

What I like about cities is that everything is king size, the beauty and the ugliness.

Twentieth-century Russian literature has produced nothing special except perhaps one novel and two stories by Andrei Platonov, who ended his days sweeping streets.

How delightful to find a friend in everyone.

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.

For darkness restores what light cannot repair.

I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

Geography blended with time equals destiny.

Life—the way it really is—is a battle not between good and bad, but between bad and worse

Poetry is what is gained in translation.

You matter. Your heart matters.

If people who were actually born had to prove they were worthy enough to live in America, this would be a much less populated country.

Still, it was vision, or at least vision’s idiot cousin.

Not that you’ll have any fun. I know my safe word, and I intend to use it.

I am traveling less in order to be able to write more. I select my travel destinations according to their degree of usefulness to my work.

The saying "the cherry on top" is only a good metaphor if the person listening or reading actually likes cherries on top of their ice cream.

One of the reasons the producers' credit has been so weakened in recent years, and given to people who didn't deserve it, was that people didn't understand what producers did.

I think it's great when stories are dark and strange and weirdly personal.

People talk about opportunity knocking, but the gate was always swinging in the breeze before I got to the door.

Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference.