People keep calling my stories “too quiet,” which is rich coming from writers who treat a paragraph like a bankruptcy filing. by Anton Chekhov

Anyway, if your novel needs 40 pages to introduce a man, it is not a novel, it is a parade.

That is because the floor is doing the most honest work in Russian literature.

Leo, your last book has more moral weather than a Russian winter and twice the baggage.

At least my sentences stand for something. Yours stand in the doorway and stare at the floor.

I asked both of you for a simple yes or no and somehow got a cathedral and a postcard.

Anton, some of us are trying to save civilization, not sell it a neat little cough and a chair.