For me, music was always a second language. I didn't have a musical background, and I started studying very late, at fourteen.

Bulgaria is a fascinating, beautiful, difficult country, and I fell in love with it.

My first months in Sofia were a time of intense disorientation: I had never been to that part of the world before; I could barely speak the language; everything seemed strange to me.

I think it's harder to avoid reflection on those larger patterns of history or society when they so insistently call into question your right to exist.

Being a high school teacher was wonderful, but unsustainable: I needed a way out.

I'm not sure I can articulate any principles behind the decisions about what to cut and what to keep.

Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do.

I'm drawn to fiction that hints at nonfiction, that blurs or seems to blur the boundaries between invention and autobiography.

When I took my first poetry class, I felt that I could understand the relationships between words and the formal qualities of language in a way I would never understand music.

I felt a lot of ambivalence about going back to graduate school for a second MFA. The impulse was really the opposite from what it had been more than a decade before: I wanted to interrupt a career.

I take pleasure as a reader in books that tease with a kind of urgency of the real, even if it's only a manufactured effect.

That kiss was amazing. Our lips were meant to meet and do wicked things to each other.

Never put off writing until you are better at it.

A friend is a stranger that you have come to know better.

most of us can only deny short-term pleasures because we see a realistic path between self-denial now and something better down the road.

A happy birthday is measured not in the amount one of gifts, but in the amount one is loved.

Don't taunt the alligator until after you've crossed the creek.

I fancy our chances at the European Championships.

Self-satisfaction and self-pity are both condemned. What are people permitted to feel about themselves?

I think I was born in Elizabethan times.

In real time, the universe has a beginning and an end at singularities that form a boundary to space-time and at which the laws of science break down.