“He was a natural, and in the Russian way, tragically above these banalities.”

“could tell that one of the Russian proverbs he loved was on the way. ‘The only place with free cheese is a mousetrap”

“I don't do romance, in the same way I don't do heroin Russian roulette, or nude alligator wrestling. I consider all of the above self-destructive, and demeaning and these are things up with which I will not put.”

“Man is above all else mind, consciousness -- that is, he is a product of history, not of nature.”

“mediocrity is a constant, as one Russian writer put it. Russians have a way with aphorisms. They probably spend all winter thinking them up.”

“I felt above all, tired. Tiredness: if there ws a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness....A banal state of affairs, yes-but our problems were banal, the stuff of women's magazines. All lives, I remember thinking, eventually funnel into the advice columns of women's magazines.”