History is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way.

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's it, cupcake. You're going down.

Neither your work to be with insensible, nor their work to be with you.

Don't ever let someone tell you the value you don't have, in order to be in someone's life. That is often the value they feel you have, not that person.

I will thank God for the day and the moment I have.

He who forsakes his own community and joins another perishes as the king who embraces an unrighteous path.

Every battalion has its marching songs.

A burning desire is the greatest motivator of every human action.

Just look at all the awards shows now. It has turned into a catwalk. You have to be wearing a certain designer, a certain dress, and everyone's critiquing.

[Barack Obama and Susan Rice] simply do not want any hearings on Benghazi, and they wouldn't be able to avoid it if she's up there as secretary of state.

Camerado! This is no book; who touches this touches a man.