When I visited Chechnya, I was taken aback at first because people would regularly make jokes about kidnapping me.
Wars break things; they break stories.
Usually I spend a long while working alone before letting anyone read what I've written.
To make a book convincing, it's less important that the right tree be in the right place than that the characters are emotionally real.
There was something about the idea of Russia that I found very intriguing, and I think I had romanticized it a lot.
Research is not an obstacle, something to be frightened of. It can be one of the real joys of writing.
I'm wondering when you hit the age where people say, 'Oh, OK, he's not so young.'
I didn't know a single person who had ever been there. I wasn't even sure how to spell Chechnya.
Grozny's been largely rebuilt. But at the same time, I think the war is very much being waged inside its survivors.
At Grozny TV, the line between journalism and government propaganda is traversed as often as a Manhattan crosswalk.
