It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him.

I can look at [my books] with pleasure from a distance. Four feet is close enough.

A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.

When you read about a car crash in which two or three youngsters are killed, do you pause to dwell on the amount of love and treasure and patience parents poured into bodies no longer suitable for open caskets?

My father is from Bosnia, and my mother is from Croatia, but I was born in Sweden.

It is difficult to live in the present, ridiculous to live in the future and impossible to live in the past. Nothing is as far away as one minute ago.