I often say that Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, and Javier Marías are my stylistic holy trinity, prose writers who amaze me with their notation of consciousness and voice.

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.

Are you nervous?"... "A little." "Do you want to stop?" "No, just go slow." "I can do that." He could do any damn thing she asked of him.

I think hell is something you carry around with you. Not somewhere you go.

If I bad mouth the Truth, and nothing but the Absolute Truth, then, kick my butt. Otherwise, ye of bad faith, keep your stupid trap shut.

She hadn't met Earth or Fire, the other two cousins, but she'd filled a couple of library requests for each of them in the past week. If they were around, they would help her. Wouldn't they?

The teacher must be an actor, an artist, passionately in love with his work.

I love to be called Doc.

Okay, that so did me in. Mr. Rock being all emotional? Expressing his feelings?" p. 12

I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our concept of the richness in human capacity.

We get into captivity because of our foolishness and we are more foolish that we want to admit.

A belt does nothing but hold your gi together. A belt has assigned significance, a belt is someone else saying you're good, you don't need other people saying that you're good in order to be good.