Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do.

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.

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.

LESS fabrication, MORE facilitation

In literary history generation follows generation in a rage.

Corporations are not in business to be social-welfare organizations; they are there to make money.

When I was 8, I got a little toy propeller plane: You could turn it on and the people disappeared from the little windows and stewardesses appeared, and it ran along the ground.

Life is like an elevator. Up and down, just make sure you get off on the right floor.

He's no more human than I am, ma petite." At least I'm not dead." That can be remedied.

Don’t have a fall back, because if you do, you’ll fall back.

Through the study of books one seeks God; by meditation one finds him.

Happiness is but a mere episode in the general drama of pain.

Caring less what everybody else thinks, but also caring less and less about what your own mind thinks, because what your own mind thinks, sometimes, is the thing that makes you sad.