“If I could start over today, I would choose literature again. If the answers exist in the world or in the universe, I still think that's where we're going to find them.”

“The anecdote appears in Théophile Gautier's 1859 biography of Balzac. I wondered if it could be shown that Babel had read Gautier. Then I wondered whether there was anything to eat at home. There wasn't. I got in my car and was driving down El Camino Real when my cell phone started ringing.”

“Every morning I called Aeroflot to ask about my suitcase. "Oh, it's you," sighed the clerk. "Yes, I have your request right here. Address: Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy's house. When we find the suitcase we will send it to you. In the meantime, are you familiar with our Russian phrase *resignation of the soul*?”

“While it's true that, as Tolstoy observed, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and everyone on planet Earth, vale of tears that it is, is certainly entitled to the specificity of his or her suffering, one nonetheless likes to think that literature has the power to render comprehensible different kinds of unhappiness. If it can't do that, what's it good for?”

“You just go around getting hung up on all the least convenient things--and if the only obstacle in your way is a little extra work, then that's the wonderful gift right there.”

“What does literature do better than anything else? It provides a detailed representation of the inner experience of being alive in a given time and place.”

“...as for unhappy families, star-crossed lovers, and exiled heroes, they are simply universal.”