I'll take any life in which I can make choices and have agency, and America is not a bad place for all that.

I long for, not a writer's retreat - I can write in any situation - but a reader's retreat.

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.

I really don't feel that any of the pieces I wrote were confessions; there are no revelations about secrets in my life, and actually I have nothing to confess and I certainly do not ask for redemption and there is no reward for confessing that I expect.

A particular piece of music attaches itself to the piece I'm writing, and there is nothing else I can listen to. Every day I return to the same space to write, the music providing both the walls and the pictures on the walls.

I wish I could avoid the people who have threatened me. My favorite threat is that I will be thrown in the River Miljacka, which is at most knee-deep, with my feet bound in cement.