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.

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 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.

Each person carries within their core the birthright of creative freedom, which, when organized and orchestrated, is the most awesome force on earth.

I want to make my mark, ' he says.But what target, I wonder, are you going to hit?

When someone is fearless, when pain isn't a factor, it's impossible to break his spirit.

If a woman's got nothing but her fair fame to feed on, why, it's thin tack, and a donkey would die of it!

I just sing and write songs and wear what I want. It's quite a good job really. If I wanted to I suppose I could become more of a fashion icon, but singing is my thing.

The world is full of more interesting things than my voice.

Love is a great thing, a good above all others, which alone maketh every burden light.

One of the things I've realized is how portable God is. No really, He's everywhere!

... but the longest day hath its evening.

Knowledge in not acquired from without but merely recollected from within. The recollection of knowledge from within is an electro-magnetic process of thinking Mind.