You never know what's going to happen in your life, and you never know what's going to happen in someone else's life either.
What inspires me most to write is the act of traveling.
My road to publishing actually came through a colleague who connected me to my agent, and the faculty at Cornell was very supportive.
In terms of people that I know, my grandmother and my mother are huge influences on my writing life because they are both massively supportive and always have been of my career.
A lot of writers that I know have told me that the first book you write, you write about your childhood, whether you want to or not. It calls you back.
In the mess of moving from place to place, I skipped two grades in the space of one year.
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.
My grandfather and I were very close.
At the end of the day, it's about the reader's attachment to and belief in the magical elements that make or break magical realism.
I think the mythology of death really ran away with me when I was very young.
A family has its own rituals and its own superstitions.
When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed.
The best fiction stays with you and changes you.
My family lived in Egypt from 1993 to 1996.
Being taken seriously, for a young writer, is a wonderful form of encouragement, but at the same time, I don't think one should ever feel like attempting a kind of artistic endeavor is beyond your scope just because of age or inexperience.
I like dark subject matter. I'm not sure what that means about me!
I am very interested in place, and the influences of place on characters.
When I hit a block, regardless of what I am writing, what the subject matter is, or what's going on in the plot, I go back and I read Pablo Neruda's poetry. I don't actually speak Spanish, so I read it translation. But I always go back to Neruda. I don't know why, but it calms me, calms my brain.
I do no writing while I'm in Belgrade visiting my grandma.
When you're in a place, the details you focus on are different than details you focus on when you're writing about it.
