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

Nobody deserves death, yet everybody gets it.

When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.

Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared, and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend.

There are moments in life when it is all turned inside out--what is real becomes unreal, what is unreal becomes tangible, and all your levelheaded efforts to keep a tight ontological control are rendered silly and indulgent.

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

There are studies that have shown that we make decisions, ethical and otherwise, based on the way we imagine ourselves as characters in the stories of our lives. In other words, if we imagine ourselves brave or crazy or open, we're more likely to make decisions in a given situation based on how we imagine ourselves, whatever the facts may be.