Even though I don't sing any more, singing was my first education in the arts, and it's clear to me that my training as a musician also shaped me as a writer.

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.

The trick is in what one emphasizes. We either make ourselves miserable, or we make ourselves happy. The amount of work is the same.

Now you also know what it is to be wanted and loved.

I love getting to bounce around and explore so much. I love Scandinavia. I love Spain. It's so mystical and romantic, yet it's gritty.

I think I've learned that if you want to be successful, you have to tell your story honestly and from your heart - and I think a healthy sense of humor doesn't hurt either.

I want to trace my father, could you suggest a good marker pen?

Did I say the book of nature is a catechism? Yes, But, after it answers the first question with "God," nothing but questions follow.

I'm not trying to take New York by storm. I just want to sneak in there, keep my head down, batten down the hatches and cook.

One may detest the wickedness of a brother without hating him.

Dad, would the love end just because a person dies?

I write characters and stories that move me, and I write from the heart.