To write has to be related to a drive inside.
In Bosnian, there’s no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there’s no word describing that.
Even if you tried to extinguish your personality, what is left in the story will reflect it, perhaps by its negation. Our lives provide the bricks from which we build these cathedrals.
I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don’t want to limit myself.
I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.
I long for, not a writer’s retreat – I can write in any situation – but a reader’s retreat.
We dreamt of light, but hoped for darkness.
Nobody deserves death, yet everybody gets it.
My skin was the border between the world and me.
I wish I could avoid the people who have threatened me. My favorite threat is that I will be thrown in the River Miljacka, which is at most knee-deep, with my feet bound in cement.
The privilege of a middle-class, stable, bourgeois life is that you can pretend that you are not complicated and project yourself as a solid, uncomplicated person, with refined life goals and achievements.
When I came to America, I was already a writer, already published in Bosnia. I was planning to go back, but I had no choice but to stay here after the civil war, so I enrolled at Northwestern in a master’s program and studied American literature.
I suppose I’m interested in sorrow, which is very different from depression or despair. Sorrow is continuous with the world; it allows for creativity.
To me there’s no difference between a book of stories and a novel – they’re just slightly different shapes.
I don’t like having a teaching job – office hours and conferences and committees and bosses and all that – but I tend to enjoy teaching, and I design the course in such a way that there’ll be pleasure in that.
I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.
I’ll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.
Sometimes I don’t write at all. Someone once asked me, “What do you do when you’re not writing?” And I said, “I idle.”
Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love.
I end up writing something every day, since I develop six or seven things at the same time – soccer columns, this and that.