I'm bright, but there are lots of bright writers and people everywhere. In no way, at no point do I think I'm better than them.

The privilege of a middle-class, stable, bourgeois life is that you can pretend that you are not complicated and project yourself as a solid, uncomplicated person, with refined life goals and achievements.

Europe is a rapidly changing place, on every level. Immigration, post-communist transitions, the unification, steady presence of war and conflict, the inescapable challenges to the notion of national literature/culture-it all exerts pressure upon writers who must be aware of the transformational possibilities of the situation.

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

The mind is complicated and you can't trace the roots of its processes, but there is something about mathematical and algorithmic patterns that I like to recognize in things.

Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.

All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.