While clearly an impregnable masterpiece, <i>Don Quixote</i> suffers from one fairly serious flaw — that of outright unreadability. - Martin Amis

Probably all writers are at some point briefly under the impression that they are in the forefront of disintegration and chaos, that they are among the first to live and work after things fall apart.

The great writers can take us anywhere; but half the time they’re taking us where we don’t want to go.

I’m sitting in the prow-shaped dining room of a tourist steamer, the Georgi Zhukov, on the Yenisei River, which flows from the foothills of Mongolia to the Arctic Ocean, thus cleaving the northern Eurasian plain – a distance of some two and a half thousand versts. Given Russian distances, and the general arduousness of Russian life, you’d expect a verst to be the equivalent of – I don’t know – thirty-nine miles. In fact it’s barely more than a kilometer.