I do think that calling a book nonfiction affirms a kind of responsibility to an attempt at truth.

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.

Ask yourself if I'm capable of contradictions, Draupadi.Some missions succeed only by their spectacular failure. - Krishn

I do not know any reading more easy more fascinating more delightful than a catalogue.

Photography, as a powerful medium of expression and communications, offers an infinite variety of perception, interpretation and execution.

Not that I lack confidence in the outcome," Ferrin said, "but would you consider entrusting the piece of my neck to somebody who is not about to confront one of the most deadly beings in the world?

Life is short, and time is swift; Roses fade, and shadows shift.

Listen, sister. I don't dance and I can't take time out now to learn.

Her absence in my life was so painful that it was a presence.

The Supreme Court is not elected, and it is therefore not a proper arbiter of social policy.

We must reserve a back shop all our own entirely free, in which to establish our real liberty and our principal retreat and solitude.

When I was a kid, I was always an athlete. I played a lot of sports. I played football, basketball, baseball and soccer.