You never know what's going to happen in your life, and you never know what's going to happen in someone else's life either.

In my earliest memory, my grandfather is bald as a stone and he takes me to see the tigers.

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

I think the mythology of death really ran away with me when I was very young.

For me it was a lot harder to come to terms with the death of my grandfather than it was to come to terms with what's happened to the former Yugoslavia.

When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed.

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.