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.

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

If there is anything that links the human to the divine, it is the courage to stand by a principle when everybody else rejects it.

Loving someone can be hard at times. You risk a lot when you love - your heart and soul, at the least. Love is the most important and most rewarding investment you can make in another person.

Promise me you'll always remember: You're braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think.

In America most everybody who's Italian is half Italian. Except me. I'm all Italian. I'm mostly Sicilian, and I have a little bit of Neapolitan in me. You get your full dose with me.

Atheism deprives superstition of its stand ground, and compels Theism to reason for its existence

Good ideas and innovations must be driven into existence by courage and patience.

Of course she had some pathetic illusions about herself or she would not be able to go on living.

Goodness is a process of becoming, not of being. What we do over and over again is what we become in the end.

I know that I am a part of something so tremendous, so great, that, if for this reason only, it is holy.

We devote our entire lives to becoming good ball players. We take batting practice until our hands bleed.