...Writers often, like cocottes who suffer while choosing a dress for a night out, reflect on the first sentence of their book. I have never been an exception. Therefore, on mature reflection, the first phrase I use is not mine. Let me, like Norman Mailer in Tough Guys, quote the master. Moreover, the same one that Mailer quoted. American writer Updike. He is the only one who knows how to describe nature - and Mailer after him - so that it does not look like an exposition, which always comes out of bad Russian writers of the late 20th century. And there are no other Russian writers of the late 20th century. With the exception, perhaps, of me. But I am a writer of the 21st century. And it’s hard to call me Russian - the Mowgli of world literature, I’m Russian only in form, but in the same blood as them - Mailer and Updike. Ink blood of words. And writers have no other way. Unless, of course, we are talking about real writers.