The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.

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.

The world is always greater than your desires; plenty is never enough.

I do believe - and I know I shouldn't - that art transcends money and success and any of that. You can still do it if you're not clinging to the notion of nobility.

It's so internalized, the way your mind works in relation to anything - it's a process, but then it isn't. It's working all the time.

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.

There are studies that have shown that we make decisions, ethical and otherwise, based on the way we imagine ourselves as characters in the stories of our lives. In other words, if we imagine ourselves brave or crazy or open, we're more likely to make decisions in a given situation based on how we imagine ourselves, whatever the facts may be.