I studied opera, and when I left conservatory I told myself I would never sing in public again.

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.

In order to build a system of values you need time and persistence

Brandon tilted his head back and closed his eyes. Unbelievable. He had his name. God had given it. Just like Reece said he would.

Fate seems to be taking me in some even stranger directions.

One of the exciting things about reporting is going to places you've never been to before.

Consciousness is nature's nightmare.

I love being a scientologist, as it's helped me in every single aspect of my life.

I didn't hear him because my two Stanley Cup rings were plugging my ears.

I think, with suits and clothes, if you keep them long enough, they all come back in fashion. It's like me. I've been around long enough and I've come back in fashion.

I don't like drawing characters facing right. If I tried to do that at a book signing, I'd have to pencil it first.

The heart is not so constituted, and the only way to dispossess it of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one