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Literature has its own life, even in a dictatorship like the Soviet Union.

American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.

Living in a cultural milieu where the foreign writers most widely available and admired were Russian, I came very late to postwar American writers, and I had great trouble with the canonically exalted white male writers I tried first.

I belong to Russian literature, but I am an American citizen, and I think it's the best possible combination.

I read Russian literature a lot.

I was thinking of writers living in East Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They wrote fantastic stuff but were dealing with a situation that was almost impossible to deal with, but they found a way.

Some major American publishing houses still seek work by foreign writers.

I'll be happy if I can gain even the smallest place inside the literary imagination of U.S. readers.

More particularly, having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature.

We see a new generation of Russian authors who are not divided from their Western contemporaries either culturally or philosophically.