My books have been published all over Europe. They read me there, and I want to read them back. I also spend a lot of time in Europe, often meeting writers, and I'm sick of apologizing for the embarrassing shortage of translations in America.

My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness.

In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.

Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.

My skin was the border between the world and me.

To write has to be related to a drive inside.

We apply the language that is comforting and comfortable and familiar in order to grasp that which confuses and scares us. That is the first step toward cliché and stereotype, as they're comforting devices. They reduce the confusing world to the already familiar. We're always smoothing out the bumps of actual living to turn it into narratable life.