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.

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.

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.

I do think that calling a book nonfiction affirms a kind of responsibility to an attempt at truth.

The Prince is the only option to a better living. His arm is reliable and dependable. Get to Him, stay glued and remain on Top!

Where music thundered let the mind be still, Where the will triumphed let there be no will, What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.

We all have the same root, and are connected...To tap into this connectedness we must go within.

Art transcends its limitations only by staying within them.

Science gave us forensics. Law gave us crime.

I would like to help my people in any way I can. It's difficult times in Pakistan and we all have to help.

None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.

My father, one of the great entrepreneurs and philanthropists of this state, taught me that capital - monetary or political - is to be used to benefit others. I intend to continue that tradition.

For once I want to have a relationship outside the public eye.

You’re not going to be a 1.000 hitter all the time. You’re going to be more wrong than right. You just have to correct your errors as quickly, as economically, as possible.