When I think about 2017, I feel like it was just another year. It was a whirlwind, but I wouldn't have wanted it to play out any other way. I'm glad I was in New York. There's nowhere else I would rather play, and there's no other group of teammates that I would rather be around.

I was 19 years old, pumping gas and going nowhere. I was kind of a high school dropout at that point because I had left school to play hockey, but no one drafted me.

I don't know how, where, and why the idea for 'Defending Your Life' began; the idea had been bouncing around for a while. Stories like that sort of have to bounce. They don't come out of nowhere. I went through my own period of life with sort of everything turning upside down, and wondering, 'Why is it this way?'

I actually didn't listen to the Beatles song 'Nowhere Man' when I was writing my book of the same name. What I listened to a lot was 'Abbey Road.' Its disjointedness and its readiness to confuse only to delight were inspiring to me.

I mean that at least 80% of the Russian people feel destitute. It's the people who had their past and future taken from them - they don't get paid - many of them face a wall. They have nowhere to go.

My ideas tend to arise out of nowhere when I'm not intentionally trying to think of something.