I think history is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way.

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.

As our federal government has grown too large and too powerful, the real loss has been the freedom of people to govern their own lives and participate fully in the American dream.

The things you own end up owning you.

What I wasn't used to was being in front of the camera.

Imperfections define perfection

If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance.

My mother was adored by her family and by the scores of children she took care of and their parents, all of whom called her 'Miss Woody.

There are strange flowers of reason to match each error of the senses. Admirable gardens of absurd beliefs, forebodings, obsessions and frenzies. Unknown, ever-changing gods take shape there.

VAMPIRE ACADEMY: Rose- See something you like? Dimitri- Get dressed. LAST SACRIFICE: Rose- See something you like? Dimitri- Lots

There is always someone out there working harder than you, and you may be standing next to him or her in your next competition.

In plain Texas talk, it's 'do the right thing'