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" I am very interested in place, and the influences of place on characters. "

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" 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 think the mythology of death really ran away with me when I was very young. "

" 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. "

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

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

" My family lived in Egypt from 1993 to 1996. "

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

" My grandfather and I were very close. "

" 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 family has its own rituals and its own superstitions. "

" 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. "

" When you're in a place, the details you focus on are different than details you focus on when you're writing about it. "

" 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. "

" The best fiction stays with you and changes you. "

" I like dark subject matter. I'm not sure what that means about me! "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" In the mess of moving from place to place, I skipped two grades in the space of one year. "

" What inspires me most to write is the act of traveling. "