I am just like everybody else...because there is nobody like me in the whole world.

I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.

A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.

The funny thing is that in Bosnia there are no words that are equivalent to fiction and nonfiction. From the storytelling point of view, the difference is artificial.

What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first time, every time.

I cannot think of a country in which I would be happy with the government and dominant ideology and available propaganda.

I've never had a stupid student in my life. I never look down on my students. I never thought, "Look at these people." I might argue with them and I think that some of them might have misconceptions - that they might be infected by the intellectual laziness that is the foundation of American popular culture, and of capitalism, if you wish. But part of my job as a teacher is to work with that - against that.