Whenever I go to New York I try to soak up as much live music as I can, including as many nights at the opera as I can manage.

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.

Sometimes when the world goes dark, and everyone turns their backs on you, just look to the sky to see the light, and follow the stars to paradise

Not fault of teaching spider if little spider pay more attention to catching fly than doing lesson.

You could have heard a bee fluff

Real transformation requires real honesty. If you want to move forward — get real with yourself.

Our fate is shaped from within ourselves outward, never from without inward.

You can't go to a negotiating table pointing a gun, but you've got to keep it over your shoulder.

I really love Durham more than any place I've ever been; some small towns can be really provincial and strangling, but Durham is the best city in the world.

It takes a special kind of person to fight back.

Black men of our day were never told, The sky's the limit. ... We could aspire to Joe Louis but never Henry Ford.