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.

Chicago is not a bad place to live. But the usual story of immigration is the happy fulfillment of human potential in America that is not available anywhere else - it's propaganda, really. It's more complicated than that.

I spotted a can in the corner whose red label read SADNESS. Was there so much of it they could can it and sell it? A bolt of pain went through my intestines before I realized that it was not SADNESS but SARDINES.

I end up writing something every day, since I develop six or seven things at the same time - soccer columns, this and that.

If you find yourself as a person in unfamiliar territory, you will grasp on to what is already familiar.

It's not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there.

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