25 Quotes by David Bezmozgis

Language is a personality as well. People are different when they speak different languages.

When you write a book, you want to have fidelity to the character. Characters and their emotions guide the structure of the novel.

When writing dialogue, I hear it in both Russian and English, and try to find a language that combines the two.

Incident at Vichy, one of my favorite Arthur Miller plays, is a play in which you look at all of the different perspectives of this moral question. And it isn’t so easy to decide which position is correct.

I think there are differences between men and women. There is more of a softness to women than there is to men, especially when it comes to those more intimate emotions: feeling love, feeling familial connections.

Why are some people highly principled and willing to do anything for their principles, while most of us are not? And I am willing to not only ask, but also answer the question.

There are books like Darkness at Noon, which from the prose standpoint I don’t think is a perfect book. It has flaws. But for its time, it was very politically courageous.

I think ex-Soviet or Russian-Jewish women are tougher and that comes through. And if they are more pragmatic than the men, it’s because they are obliged to be. They have all the female responsibilities and all the male responsibilities.

I think even with women who come across with a tough exterior, the interior is the same. I think you’ll find this with women around the word: some women, because of their circumstances, are forced to be tougher, forced to cultivate tougher exteriors.