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.

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.

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.

I'm about as intimidating as a butterfly.

The brave with all of their weaknesses are better than the cowardly with all of their strengths.

Hospitality is the practice of God's welcome by reaching across difference to participate in God's actions bringing justice and healing to our world in crisis.

By seeing how small the world is, I realize how capable I am. I can conquer anything. Anywhere. Anyone.

I felt early on I wasn't going to be a respectable citizen.

If you raise taxes during a recession, you head to depression.

Change is not always progress... A fever of newness has everywhere been confused with the spirit of progress.

There's an entire universe in every single tweet, and it all really depends on the content as far as how it's going to spread.

Rock and roll is a nuclear blast of reality in a mundane world where no-one is allowed to be magnificent.

Humor is the pensiveness of wit.