My father, a Russian translator, wanted to distinguish me by calling me Misha, the Russian diminutive of his name, Michael. My name and work as a writer specialising in the Balkans has created a myth that I have Slavic connections, but actually I am British.

Misha Glenny

I love the combination of the words 'spies' and 'Balkans.' It's like meat and potatoes.

Alan Furst

Romanians are culturally European, very close to the French. Socially, they are now building a society that is emotionally closer to the Balkans, Turkey and Greece.

Andrei Codrescu

On its fifth full-length album, 'Cervantine,' A Hawk and a Hacksaw's love of the Balkans continues unabated, but with new songs and collaborators. In 'Uskudar,' the music finds an equal balance of sweet, sour and earthy sounds with nimble string melodies and a grunting tuba.

Anthony Fantano

I've worked behind counters serving food, and I've lived on the circus train, and I've led bicycle tours in Eastern Europe and the Balkans and Russia. I've been a key liner for a newspaper, I've done typesetting. Oh, all sorts of things.

Bonnie Jo Campbell

Remember all those references to Macedonia as the oasis of peace in the Balkans. You only really appreciate it when you have lost it.

Boris Trajkovski

I will always fight for peace. But, unfortunately, it is war that drives us forward. It is war that makes the major turns. It makes Wall Street function; it makes all the bastards in the Balkans function.

Emir Kusturica

Well, let's assume the world is linear. If we required a certain amount of troops per 25,000 population in the Balkans, if the world is not radically different, something of the same extent is going to be needed in Iraq.

Eric Shinseki

We are not only talking about waves of refugees coming to Greece, to Italy, and elsewhere. Destabilizing the Balkans means Lebanonization, and that means destabilizing all of Europe.

Fatos Nano

Let's make a deal with the Serbs. Neither history nor emotion in the Balkans will permit multinationalism. We have to give up on the illusion of the last eight years... Dayton isn't working. Nobody - except diplomats and petty officials - believes in a sovereign Bosnia and the Dayton accords.

Franjo Tudjman

I was a news reporter for 16 years, seven of them a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Africa and the Balkans. Perhaps the most useful equipment I acquired in that time is a lack of preciousness about the act of writing. A reporter must write. There must be a story. The mot juste unarriving? Tell that to your desk.

Geraldine Brooks

There a lot of occasions when Albanians cause trouble, but then we are also very nice people. People sometimes forget that there are good people from the Balkans as well.

Granit Xhaka

Guidebooks used to write the name of my city in two ways: Gjirokaster in Albanian, and Argyrokastron for foreigners. The classical-sounding name somehow gave it better credentials, because people in the Balkans famously exaggerate and often call their villages cities.

Ismail Kadare

I forced myself to watch Spanish TV and listen to Spanish radio all the time. I think I'm lucky because, for whatever reason, people from the Balkans seem to have a talent for learning languages.

Ivan Rakitic

There has been enough blood in the Balkans. Serbia is offering its hand. Let us turn to the future and not deal with the past.

Ivica Dacic

'Hedwig' was the first audition my agent ever sent me on. I still have the slip of paper where I wrote down the appointment. I wrote down, 'Headwitch and the Angry Itch. Yitzhak. Croatian ex-drag queen billed as the last Jewess of the Balkans Krystal Nacht.'

Miriam Shor

My father, a Russian translator, wanted to distinguish me by calling me Misha, the Russian diminutive of his name, Michael. My name and work as a writer specialising in the Balkans has created a myth that I have Slavic connections, but actually I am British.

Misha Glenny

Historically, the Balkans have been an incubator of war.

Pat Buchanan

A history of perceived humiliation, after all, lurks behind many acts of terror. And competing narratives of victimhood and insults sustain conflicts in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East and many other regions.

Serge Schmemann

There are some common problems in the Balkans in the settlement of which Bulgaria should also participate.

Todor Zhivkov

The people of the Balkans are like a dysfunctional family. We may fight and argue, but in the end we are family.

Vlade Divac