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

Every writer owes something to a particular tradition he/she grew up in. But no serious writer - other than the militantly nationalist ones - would reduce his/her domain of influence to a single tradition. Furthermore, historical breaks are so common and large in Europe that there are ruptures in every tradition which then connect the same generations across national borders. Younger Eastern European writers, for instance, have more in common with other writers of the same age in Europe, than with the previous, communist-era generations in their own countries.

I've read books in school that were written by ideological rote - they were brainwashers. Therefore, any art, any literature, that has a clearly defined political goal is repellent to me.

If you have information you've got the world by the balls. But we have to convert information into knowledge in order to make it humanly useful.

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.

It seemed that we loved each other better when there were large swaths of two continents between us. The daily work of love was often hard to perform at home.

My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness.