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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.

I think every writer has a book that haunts them, and on some level, every book you write is a reaction to it. 'Lolita' is that book for me. Nabokov's love of wordplay, descriptive detail, artfully complex plots, and his themes of obsession and lost love, are inspiring.

I took a 19th-century Russian novel class in college and have been smitten with Russian literature ever since. Writers like Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Grossman, and Solzhenitsyn tackle the great questions of morality, politics, love, and death.

I always love novels that open up a subject to me - like raising a window to a beautiful, mysterious world outside.

I have always loved reading, so was interested in the literary world, and took many literary portraits.

When I was young, about 18 or 19, I read all the Dostoyevsky novels, which made me want to go to St. Petersburg. So I went, and I was so inspired.

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

Travel books are, by and large, boring. They lodge uncomfortably between fact, fiction and autobiography.

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.