As long as there are living human beings, there will be language and stories.

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.

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.

It's not that war crimes stop as soon as a novel about them is published. Literature operates slowly, it is always inching toward bliss, never quite getting there.

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

New York is the Hollywood of the publishing industry, complete with stars, starlets, suicidal publishers/producers, intrigues, and a lot of money.

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.