There’s no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all.
If you can’t go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.
One builds one’s life in consistency; one invests it with the belief, however unsupported by reality, that one has always been what one is now, that even in one’s distant past one could recognize the seed from which this doomed flower has bloomed.
Our daughter was born in Chicago, and she’s already showing it. The temperature has to be approaching zero for her to wear a hat.
The people who listened to rock ‘n’ roll, I thought, were bound together against the people who didn’t listen to rock ‘n’ roll. That, of course, didn’t work at all. Your taste in rock ‘n’ roll does not say anything about you, morally or otherwise.
Projecting yourself until everything is talking about you is, of course, a self-flattering form of self-pity.
Where can you go from nowhere, except deeper into nowhere?
Memory narrativises itself.
The way I think of my work is that I have to think up the way to tell a story, starting from scratch. The changes in the industry concern me in a general way because I think civilization is doomed.
I recognized him then; that is, I finally comprehended what I had known but had never been able to formulate: he had always been complete. He had finished the work of becoming himself, long before any of us could even imagine such a feat was possible.
Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared, and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend.
All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.
My country’s main exports are stolen cars and sadness.
It seemed that we loved each other better when there were large swaths of two continents between us. The daily work of love was often hard to perform at home.
Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.
I’ve been a Nick Cave fan since the early ’80s when he was part of The Birthday Party thing singing Australian self-destructive rock band and I’ve always followed his work and loved it.
For people who are displaced, you can reconstruct the story of your life from the objects you have access to, but if you don’t have the objects then there are holes in your life. This is why people in Bosnia – if anyone was running back into a burning house, it was to salvage photos.
I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I’m not a novelist, I’m a writer.
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.