Sometimes I don't write at all. Someone once asked me, "What do you do when you're not writing?" And I said, "I idle."

I don't like having a teaching job - office hours and conferences and committees and bosses and all that - but I tend to enjoy teaching, and I design the course in such a way that there'll be pleasure in that.

I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.

You can see the diversity that pieces in the anthology represent, and then the interconnections-obvious and less obvious-between various stories or between various modes of storytelling. Diversity generates need for conversation, conversation generates common interests, as well as differences. Literature, as a human project, is all about that.

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

Lord, why did you leave me in these woods?

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.