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.

You devise ways to tell a story that complies with your sensibility. Style and method are really extensions of your present sensibility.

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

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

I dont make notes for myself because I either lose them or they make no sense to me at all. I once found a piece of paper with the note: everything. Apparently I made a note to myself not to forget everything!

The hopeless hope is one of the early harbingers of spring, bespeaking an innocent belief that the world might right its wrongs and reverse its curses simply because the trees are coming into leaf.

I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.