Soviet mathematics was particularly good in the second half of the 20th century, basically because of the arms race, because the Soviet Union realized... World War II created the conditions for the Soviet Union to become a superpower.

By the mid-noughties, I found that I was no longer the only openly gay person in every setting. At one point, a couple of Moscow magazine publishers even got the idea that they should actively headhunt gay and lesbian staff.

When your doctor and neighbours and child's schoolteachers know you are gay, there is no closet for you to hide in.

For years I was the only publicly out gay person who was not a full-time gay activist: my position as a quasi-foreigner gave me a privileged perch, and my ability to earn money by writing for western publications made me almost impervious to discrimination. Other Russians were not in a hurry to come out.

I really can't abide conspiracy theories, because I believe that everything in the world stems from idiocy and incompetence. That's certainly true of most of what's happened in Russia under Putin.

I have experienced power as a journalist. On three different occasions, when I wrote about individual immigrants or refugees, the article - or, in one case, my presence in the courtroom - appeared to positively change the outcome of their cases.

Journalists casually use terms like crossing the border illegally when referring to asylum seekers - when in fact there is no law that says they must use the ports of entry.

If human rights are an attribute of being human, then we must consider the fact that tens of millions of displaced people around the world have been rendered less than human.

If you grew up in Boston, you actually grew up thinking that Patriots' Day is a major American holiday, sort of like the other Fourth of July.

The American justice system administers punishment. It does not conduct inquests and it does not find facts.

It's very difficult to write in Russian for someone who has never been schooled in Russian.

Putin set out to build a mafia state. He didn't set out to build a totalitarian regime. But he was building his mafia state on the ruins of a totalitarian regime. And so we end up with a mafia state and a totalitarian society.

Americans voted for Trump. A lot of people in this country feel the system of representative democracy hasn't worked for them for a long, long time. And those are the issues that this election gives us an unfortunate opportunity to engage with. And engaging instead with the Russia conspiracy takes up that bandwidth.

I think Donald Trump was brought to power by Americans. They voted for him.

There aren't a lot of things that are extraordinary about Putin, but his greed is truly extraordinary.

St. Petersburg, under the czars, had been a grand city. It was a planned city, and it had - there were all these Parisian architects who had been brought in to build the apartment buildings in the center of town.

It seems that probably Putin's father maintained some connection to the secret police throughout his life. One sign of that is that they had a telephone, and people didn't have telephones in the Soviet Union in the 1950s.

I think that when you emigrate, when everything you took for granted disappears, it's a kind of loss of innocence. When you're a kid, the world as you know it is just there. Suddenly, you emigrate and that's no longer the case. It's a break in reality that parachutes you into adulthood.

I do a very good impersonation of an American - I went to high school here - but I've spent most of my life in Russia.

Basically, Trump's significant first moves have been twofold. To marginalize the media, and to start dismantling the federal government.

I have a little hope that the nuclear holocaust doesn't happen.

In war you're either a collaborator or you're a resistor. I mean you don't get to be neutral.

I mean, hunger strike is almost a ritual in a Russian prison colony. It actually has been going back to Soviet times. It's a way of protesting.

I think that Russian meddling in the election is an important issue.