I realized that there was an intellectual content in music, a kind of thinking, that I would never be able to hear.

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.

It usually takes 100 years to make a law and then after it's done its work it usually takes 100 years to be rid of it.

The government solution to a problem is usually as bad as the problem.

Every bit of joy in my heart, you know, every smile on my face is yours. It's awesome to be able to share that with somebody.

Lingerie has gotten really cute, with little booty underwear and the cute little bras. They've gotten really detailed. I saw one the other day with little baby pearls on the strap. I had to have it.

I believe that art has a kind of rightness, as in music, when we hear whether or not a note is false

Clint Eastwood's a good friend, too - he and I used to play in softball games together.

When I get really hammered I take my clothes off. That's a sure sign. It's been a long time since the last time I did that. Probably a year.

In the future, maybe quantum mechanics will teach us something equally chilling about exactly how we exist from moment to moment of what we like to think of as time.

All Norwegian children learn to swim when they are very young because if you can't swim it is difficult to find a place to bathe.

Have courage enough to accept what you can not change, but yet courageous enough to stand up and fight for what you can.