I want to change something. I want to stop the germs from attacking my daughters.

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

What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first time, every time.

No reader owes me anything - I am owed nothing for my noble efforts, because my writing was always unconditional, always coming out of inner necessity.

Nobody deserves death, yet everybody gets it.

The funny thing is that in Bosnia there are no words that are equivalent to fiction and nonfiction. From the storytelling point of view, the difference is artificial.

We hated pretentiousness; it was a form of self-hatred.