I have a love/hate relationship with just about everything, but certainly with America.

After all, this is America, and you can swap out the parts of yourself that don't work. You can rebuild yourself piece by piece.

In America, the distance between wanting something and having it delivered to your living room is not terribly great.

And the looks on the faces of my countrymenpassive heads bent arms at their trousers everyone guilty of not being their best of not earning their daily bread the kind of docility I had never expected from Americans even after so many years of our decline. Here was the tiredness of failure imposed on a country that believed only in its opposite. Here was the end product of our deep moral exhaustion.

In a strange way, I expected Russia to become more like America since the Soviet Union collapsed, but the reverse is true. America has become more like Russia: a kleptocratic society.

I just want fiction to remain a vital force for entertainment and not just for contemplation. Both things can exist.