I'm not sure any narrative model has been more important for me than Benjamin Britten's chamber operas.

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.

One has no room for vengeance, ' says Shara, 'when the eyes of the world are watching. We must be judicious, and bloodless.

Everyone might think Lizzie's an angel, but I knew better. She was selfish, and she was going to pay.

I'm really not interested in showing me or playing me. My gift as an actor, given to me, is to be able to become other people.

Small habits well pursued betimes May reach the dignity of crimes.

You really are a scary man,no really! If I had boots I would be quaking in them.

Let's start off with my father being a mailman.

The poetry is all in the anticipation, for there is none in reality.

Most of my sermons are inspirational, and I believe people need that encouragement.

I think the important thing is to realize that the establishment of a democracy is sometimes a messy thing and it takes time. Yeah, we've been at it 240 years.

How can I tell you what I think until I've heard what I'm going to say?