I don't believe in inspiration. I write when I can't avoid writing anymore.

It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create.

I end up writing something every day, since I develop six or seven things at the same time - soccer columns, this and that.

The hopeless hope is one of the early harbingers of spring, bespeaking an innocent belief that the world might right its wrongs and reverse its curses simply because the trees are coming into leaf.

To write has to be related to a drive inside.

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.

I want a book to contain a world - indeed the world. Writing is my main means of engagement with the world and I want the scars of that engagement to be left in the language.