Writing is a mode of agency in the world that is different from mere employment. There has to be some sort of ethical or moral drive, even if you are unaware of it.

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.

I want to make money, and I would like to have a lot of money, but I still believe that the only reason to write is that somehow it will make something or somebody better.

In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

I am just like everybody else...because there is nobody like me in the whole world.

I loved you because there was no other place for me to go. We were married because we did not know what else to do with each other. You never knew me, nothing about me, what died inside me, what lived invisibly.