The balls do not make a writer.

I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.

Despite all that I know rationally, and everything that I can put into words, I can say that I have difficulty giving up the notion of the nobility of art.

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.

I had an epiphany: I was a loser.

I cannot think of a country in which I would be happy with the government and dominant ideology and available propaganda.

Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love.