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

I grew up in Cyprus and Egypt, these fantastic places I remember fondly.

I do no writing while I'm in Belgrade visiting my grandma.

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.

The best fiction stays with you and changes you.

My grandfather and I were very close.

A family has its own rituals and its own superstitions.

Come on, is your heart a sponge or a fist?

We're all entitled to our superstitions.

My mother always says that fear and pain are immediate, and that, when they're gone we're left with the concept, but not the true memory.

I've always written about animals. I'm still trying to process why that is.

With patient persistence, you will conquer any situation.

The idea that anyone would think their religious ideas make them morally superior is just preposterous.

There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.

La duda es uno de los nombres de la inteligencia.

[God is] an all-encompassing love that is the source of all, the reality of all, and the being through which I am.

The wicked are always ungrateful.

I just want ambitious teenagers to know it is totally fine to be quite, observant kids. Besides being a delight to your parents, you will find you have plenty of time later to catch up.

Almost everyone's instinct is to be overconfident and read way too much into a hot or cold streak.

You can say we're trying too hard or that we didn't try hard enough, but we're not trying at all; we're just doing what we do.

I always felt that nobody was going to understand me, going to understand what I felt about things. I guess that's why I started writing. At least on paper I could put down what I thought.