“Ummiye is currently working on a screenplay called "Footless on Her Own Feet." It tells the story of a handicapped girl whose fifty-year-old mother pushes her to school every day in a wheelbarrow. Eventually, she wins a national drawing contest, making a super-realistic picture of herself in the wheelbarrow. With the prize money, she buys a wheelchair. Like the Arslankoy theatre, the girl's drawing uses artistic representation to change the thing represented. By drawing a truthful picture of the humiliating wheelbarrow, she transforms it into a dignified wheelchair-- much as a theatre, by representing the injustice of village women's life, might make that life more just. Nabokov once claimed that the inspiration for Lolita was an art work produced by an ape in the Jardin des Plantes: a drawing of the bars of its cage. It's a good metaphor for artistic production. What else do we ever draw besides the bars of our cage, or the wheelbarrow we rode in as crippled children? How else do cages get smashed? How else will we stand on our own feet?”

“As far as I can recall, the initial shiver of inspiration [for Lolita] was somehow prompted by a newspaper story about an ape in the Jardin des Plantes, who, after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever charcoaled by an animal: this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature's cage.”

“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.”

“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?”

“The drawing is also a reminder that there’s an artist within each of us, and we must encourage that artist to do the work, to make something that matters, regardless of anything else that is going on.”

“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*?”

“Each work of criticism is supposed to build on the body of work, to increase the total sum of human understanding. It's not like filling your house with more and more beautiful wicker baskets. It's supposed to be cumulative - it believes in progress.”