Outsider means “I will accept the possibility that I don’t have responsibility for what is happening inside my domain.”
I never thought of myself as an outsider. Because outside of what? You would have to give advantage to this space where you’re not, to think of it as sovereign because you’re not there. I was always in the center of where I needed to be.
Everyone operates within their own domain and obviously those domains overlap to a great extent.
I have been on the margins in terms of having to find a place to live and getting a job, but at some point, and before that point, I always thought no matter where I am, that’s the center.
Writing is a mode of agency in the world that is different from mere employment. There has to be some sort of ethical or moral drive, even if you are unaware of it.
Politics is about ethics and morality, openly or not openly.
If I represent the world as it is as harmonious, that’s a political position.
I know a lot of people in the city, at all levels, horizontally and vertically – and that to me is a privilege, to me as a person but also a writer. I’ve dined with billionaires, and I play soccer with busboys.
I’m a dilettante by temperament. I don’t have any expectation.
I’m bright, but there are lots of bright writers and people everywhere. In no way, at no point do I think I’m better than them.
I have a hard time imagining a country or a government where I would say, “Oh, this is good,” where I could live under a government that I respect for a day or a week, even to see what it feels like.
There is a point in fighting. There is a point in struggle. Not wholesale revolution, maybe, that might not be possible, an absolutely just society, but there are plenty of spaces and places where it’s worth putting up a fight.
I want to change something. I want to stop the germs from attacking my daughters.
Politics imagined as direct agency, whether by voting or by participating in politics, you can think you’re not political because you don’t do anything between elections.
I don’t believe in inspiration. I write when I can’t avoid writing anymore.
The funny thing is that in Bosnia there are no words that are equivalent to fiction and nonfiction. From the storytelling point of view, the difference is artificial.
Chicago is not a bad place to live. But the usual story of immigration is the happy fulfillment of human potential in America that is not available anywhere else – it’s propaganda, really. It’s more complicated than that.
The mind is complicated and you can’t trace the roots of its processes, but there is something about mathematical and algorithmic patterns that I like to recognize in things.
You devise ways to tell a story that complies with your sensibility. Style and method are really extensions of your present sensibility.
The beauty of literature – also its limit – is that it is inescapably personal, even if you’re writing science fiction.