Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans.

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.

The balls do not make a writer.

When I found myself in the U.S., and the war was at full swing in Bosnia, I read for survival - it was a means of thought resuscitation.

It's not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there.

My skin was the border between the world and me.

To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.