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.

Bulgaria is a fascinating, beautiful, difficult country, and I fell in love with it.

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.

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

When darkness falls and eyes stay shutA chain of voices opens up.Let wax not wane give breath to death.p.s. Shhh" -Yvonne Woon(Dead Beautiful)

Men tend to feel threatened women tend to feel guilty.

Our whole life is but a greater and longer childhood.

Every human actions becomes dangerous when it is deprived of human feeling. When they are performed with feeling and respect for human values, all activities become constructive.

Now you're coming back to Earth, and things are getting more and more dynamic.

The essence of Buddhism is simply that the mind is forever. We are always experiencing different states of mind in one form or another, in one body or another, in one life or another, forever.

We are all dying of life.

I did bully somebody. I was insecure.

The sage says that all that is under heaven incurs the same law and the same fate.

I'm a guy who gets more out of life than some people - more out of one big breath of fresh air than most people get from breathing in and out for a lifetime.