At the end of the day, it's about the reader's attachment to and belief in the magical elements that make or break magical realism.

A family has its own rituals and its own superstitions.

Everything necessary to understand my grandfather lies between two stories: the story of the tiger’s wife, and the story of the deathless man. These stories run like secret rivers through all the other stories of his life – of my grandfather’s days in the army; his great love for my grandmother; the years he spent as a surgeon and a tyrant of the University. One, which I learned after his death, is the story of how my grandfather became a man; the other, which he told to me, is of how he became a child again.

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

In the mess of moving from place to place, I skipped two grades in the space of one year.

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

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.