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.

When I came to America, I was already a writer, already published in Bosnia. I was planning to go back, but I had no choice but to stay here after the civil war, so I enrolled at Northwestern in a master's program and studied American literature.

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

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.

I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.

There's no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all.

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