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Of all the writers I have read, Vladimir Nabokov has made the biggest impression on me because he, despite living through the 1917 February Revolution, forced exile amidst the anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, the two World Wars and quite a lot of controversy, was an author who never gave up.

Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger, I never wrote a word of dialogue because of him. I thought it was a childish part of a novel.

Seem to be telling this, but really telling that. Three-dimensional writing, like three-dimensional chess. Nabokov was the other master of that. You could learn something from Nabokov on every page he ever wrote.

I'm the biggest Chekov fan - there's something that he does that not many other writers do.

Nabokov's adventures in language and style and naked braininess are really unparalleled.

I jabbered too much in class about all the Russian writers whom I admired for being, among other things, uncouth and somewhat humorously melodramatic, such as Gogol and Dostoyevsky, just as it was in my own household when I was growing up.

Hemingway changed prose; so did Salinger and Nabokov.

I am neither an Occidental writer nor a Russian writer. I am an accidental writer.

Lenin lived, Lenin lives, Lenin will live.

I like Chekov a lot.