I'm drawn to fiction that hints at nonfiction, that blurs or seems to blur the boundaries between invention and autobiography.

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.

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.

Thought I couldn't live without youIt's gonna hurt when it heals tooEven though I really love youI'm gonna smile cause I deserve toQuickly I'm learning to love againAll I know is I'mma be ok

A religious woman is a slave that advocates the slavery.

The only people that should vote should be legal.

Science has made unrestricted national sovereignty incompatible with human survival. The only possibilities are now world government or death.

I was very attached to my family when my father died. I was 19. I was about to go live with my father right when he died, so it was very intense.

For me, writing [was] a question of survival...I could not trust anyone, even my family. The atmosphere was so poisoned. People even in your own family could turn you in.

The limit of your present understanding is not the limit of your possibilities.

Gashed with honourable scars,Low in Glory's lap they lie;Though they fell, they fell like stars,Streaming splendour through the sky.

Since I went no grasse hath growne on my hele.

He is truly wise who gains wisdom from another's mishap.