Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Memory narrativises itself.
The balls do not make a writer.
I had an epiphany: I was a loser.
Lord, why did you leave me in these woods?
We dreamt of light, but hoped for darkness.
Belief and delusion are incestuous siblings.
Nobody deserves death, yet everybody gets it.
To write has to be related to a drive inside.
My skin was the border between the world and me.
Your nightmares follow you like a shadow, forever.
My country's main exports are stolen cars and sadness.
We hated pretentiousness; it was a form of self-hatred.
The perfect borscht is what life should be but never is.
Where can you go from nowhere, except deeper into nowhere?
Politics is about ethics and morality, openly or not openly.
Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there.
Washington D.C.! Congress is full of self-declared outsiders.
I'm a dilettante by temperament. I don't have any expectation.
Time does nothing but hand you down shabbier and older things.
The more you lose, the more is to be lost, yet it matters less.
I believe people are much more complicated than they can handle.
An unjust world represented as harmonious is a political position.
I much preferred winning to thinking and I didn't like losing at all.
The world is always greater than your desires; plenty is never enough.
There's no connection between consumption of art and moral stamina at all.
I don't believe in inspiration. I write when I can't avoid writing anymore.
If I represent the world as it is as harmonious, that's a political position.
As long as there are living human beings, there will be language and stories.
I want to change something. I want to stop the germs from attacking my daughters.
I am just like everybody else...because there is nobody like me in the whole world.
People will always tell stories. The publishing industry might vanish, but not stories.
In some way there is no real life. It's always the story of your life that you're living.
I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.
Because sometimes you have no control over life and it keeps you far away from who you love.
Everyone operates within their own domain and obviously those domains overlap to a great extent.
If you find yourself as a person in unfamiliar territory, you will grasp on to what is already familiar.
It was always clear to me that I would have to earn my readers, some I would have to find, some to create.
Memoir implies the need to reveal something about yourself - to recount your life for educational purposes.
To me there's no difference between a book of stories and a novel - they're just slightly different shapes.
What you demand from storytelling is a moral - even political - import. I tend to shun that didactic aspect.
Projecting yourself until everything is talking about you is, of course, a self-flattering form of self-pity
I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.
Your memories become fantasies if they are not shared, and your life in all its triviality becomes a legend.
Rilke said that art can come only out of inner necessity. I write because I must. Or because I cannot not write.
In Bosnian, there's no distinction in literature between fiction and nonfiction; there's no word describing that.
Sometimes I don't write at all. Someone once asked me, "What do you do when you're not writing?" And I said, "I idle."
We, as writers, have to figure out a way to create a consciousness in language. It's crazy even to attempt to do that.
Outsider means "I will accept the possibility that I don't have responsibility for what is happening inside my domain."
There's no bad writing; you did something. I was operating inside language, and I did something. I'm not ashamed of it.
The beauty of literature - also its limit - is that it is inescapably personal, even if you're writing science fiction.