Wash the bones, bring the body, leave the heart behind.

When you're in a place, the details you focus on are different than details you focus on when you're writing about it.

My road to publishing actually came through a colleague who connected me to my agent, and the faculty at Cornell was very supportive.

We're all entitled to our superstitions.

I do no writing while I'm in Belgrade visiting my grandma.

A lot of writers that I know have told me that the first book you write, you write about your childhood, whether you want to or not. It calls you back.

At the end of the day, despite all the other great things that literature does in society and in a person's life, I think that we read to escape. And I think that place, more than anything, provides that escape quickly, if an author is engaged with the place.