Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You don't want your neurosurgeon to have doubts about the meaning of it all while he or she is operating on your brain.
I cannot think of a country in which I would be happy with the government and dominant ideology and available propaganda.
If you can't go home, there is nowhere to go, and nowhere is the biggest place in the world-indeed, nowhere is the world.
I end up writing something every day, since I develop six or seven things at the same time - soccer columns, this and that.
I don't think that everyone should have a philosophical answer to any given question. There are things that need to be done.
I write and read with the assumption that literature contains knowledge of human experience that is not available otherwise.
Arabs are a complete abstraction in the propaganda world and all the death and destruction is completely unreal to Americans.
When I look at my old pictures, all I can see is what I used to be but am no longer. I think: What I can see is what I am not.
I tend to wait for true stories to mature into fiction. Most of my fiction grew out of a long-germinating real-life situation.
I'm bright, but there are lots of bright writers and people everywhere. In no way, at no point do I think I'm better than them.
All the lives I could live, all the people I will never know, never will be, they are everywhere. That is all that the world is.
What I don't like about America is not necessarily an American thing; it's a capitalist thing. This is the Vatican of capitalism.
Our daughter was born in Chicago, and she's already showing it. The temperature has to be approaching zero for her to wear a hat.
I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.
It's so internalized, the way your mind works in relation to anything - it's a process, but then it isn't. It's working all the time.
I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.
You devise ways to tell a story that complies with your sensibility. Style and method are really extensions of your present sensibility.
I cannot live or write without music. It stimulates the normally dormant parts of my brain that come in handy when constructing fiction.
When I found myself in the U.S., and the war was at full swing in Bosnia, I read for survival - it was a means of thought resuscitation.
I gradually became aware that my interiority was inseparable from my exteriority, that the geography of my city was the geography of my soul.
You have to suspend thinking in narratives. The moment you are conscious of yourself the gap opens up. And in this gap, stories are generated.
I like to blur the line between fact and fiction, but not to condescend to the reader by enmeshing her/him into some sort of a postmodern coop.
We knew - but didn't want to know - what was going to happen, the sky descending upon our heads like the shadow of a falling piano in a cartoon.
If you have information you've got the world by the balls. But we have to convert information into knowledge in order to make it humanly useful.
New York is the Hollywood of the publishing industry, complete with stars, starlets, suicidal publishers/producers, intrigues, and a lot of money.
It's difficult for me to understand how it was possible to live under the Bush regime for eight years and then just roll over and do other things.
What fiction and art can do, particularly narrative art, is construct consciousness - in a sense, we have to do it for the first time, every time.
Language is so inherent to humanity, so necessary for even basic thinking, that stories and poetry are available to anyone who can process language.
The incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth - reality is the fastest American commodity.
I suppose I'm interested in sorrow, which is very different from depression or despair. Sorrow is continuous with the world; it allows for creativity.
No reader owes me anything - I am owed nothing for my noble efforts, because my writing was always unconditional, always coming out of inner necessity.
I don't know the numbers, but roughly half of the people who came through Ellis Island returned home. They came here to make money, not to make history.
Despite all that I know rationally, and everything that I can put into words, I can say that I have difficulty giving up the notion of the nobility of art.
I hate traveling and being away from my family. But I like meeting my readers, as what I write is actualized in them. Those encounters are exhilarating to me.
I'm not nervous if I think about something for nine years and then I don't write it. Even if it fades it doesn't concern me. It'll come back if it's worth it.
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.
Whatever solidarity I have established with other writers individually, it is usually organized around books. We connected as readers, as it were, not writers.
I like the idea of a book being a democratic space which readers enter, carrying their own thoughts, and participate in a conversation, or experience of grace.
There's something in psychology called the narrative paradigm, which essentially means that we think of our lives as stories in which we are the main characters.
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.
Wherever there's capitalism there's this inclination toward simplicity. There's also a human need to process complicated things by turning them into something else.
Writing is a mode of agency in the world that is different from mere employment. There has to be some sort of ethical or moral drive, even if you are unaware of it.
I do believe - and I know I shouldn't - that art transcends money and success and any of that. You can still do it if you're not clinging to the notion of nobility.
What I was interested in is the lens organizing my sovereign space. I avoid the term outsider and also exile for the same reason. Outsider implies a kind of nobility.
The funny thing is that in Bosnia there are no words that are equivalent to fiction and nonfiction. From the storytelling point of view, the difference is artificial.
You are always working on your worst book and your best book at the same time. The praise does not make you write better, and it shouldn't make you write worse, either.
Politics imagined as direct agency, whether by voting or by participating in politics, you can think you're not political because you don't do anything between elections.
Cliché activates the comfortable mental laziness, we sort of revert to the domain of the already-familiar, what we have already imagined so that it doesn't seem that bad.
I want to make money, and I would like to have a lot of money, but I still believe that the only reason to write is that somehow it will make something or somebody better.
I want a book to contain a world - indeed the world. Writing is my main means of engagement with the world and I want the scars of that engagement to be left in the language.