In Bulgarian I am much more flowery, the sentences are wilder. In English out of necessity I try to be clear and disciplined. I realized by writing in English there is so much more to writing a good story than the style.

When I was writing in Bulgarian, I could hide behind beautiful prose.

Helpful to me over the years was some of Ernest Hemingway's writing, for example A Farewell to Arms. You have characters who speak Italian or Spanish to each other. It's been helpful to me to study and try to emulate that in that way.

I'm interested in the way our world is defined by language, the living word. How restrained we are by the concept of language, but when you tweak it a little bit your eyes can be opened and your world is totally changed.

That's one of the things I wanted to explore, the idea that I don't agree with one bit, that to be Bulgarian is to be Christian and if you're Muslim you're a Turk. It's that sort of line of reasoning that's causing a lot of trouble. Because what does religion really have to do with anything? It's just a bizarre question.

I think that's the nature of the region, not even simply Eastern Europe but the Balkans. They are their own region. They are a peculiar place. They do share a history that we don't share with a country like Ukraine for example, and that's because of the presence of the Ottomans for hundreds of years.

One of the things people often say about America is that it's a such a young country, relatively, and its problem - Europeans say this - is that they have no memory. I don't agree with this. In the Balkans, the problem is that we cannot forget. The problem is we have great memory.