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

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.

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.

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

Know this for sure: When you get the chance, go for it.

Be joyful and expect a great future.

It's hard not being able to see you, but my life in Tokyo would be a lot worse if it weren't for you.

They who are the most persistent and work in the true spirit will invariably be the most successful.

Hee that eats the hard shall eate the ripe.

Without the element of uncertainty, the bringing off of even, the greatest business triumph would be dull, routine, and eminently unsatisfying.

I began to see my life and each breath I am given as a living prayer to God and a way to pray for others for our world.

Planets are the big bullies of the planetary system that are, that basically ignore everybody else around them. And everybody else has to deal with the planets. Those are what the planets are.

I look at old interviews and things and they say, 'What do you want to do when you grow up?' I say, 'I want to be a producer.' And I'm really fortunate that I was able to do it.

It is when we love the other, the enemy, that we obtain from God the key to an understanding of who He is, and who we are.