The academy is an incredibly sheltered world, and I do think it's important for writers to get out from under that shelter, at least for a while, to see what the world looks like from outside it.

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.

Some of us find our lives abridged even before the paperback comes out.

I miss those days even though I wasn't alive.

The right? Ah, what does it help to be in the right if you don't have any power?

My best ideas almost always come from winding up in unexpected places and stumbling across things I never could have imagined in advance.

The higher the tower, the greater the fall thereof.

Coffee, according to the women of Denmark, is to the body what the Word of the Lord is to the soul.

It is revolutionary for any trans person to choose to be seen and visible in a world that tells us we should not exist.

Love is an irreresisistible desire to be irresistibily desired.

After I found April Barrows, I felt I had found a soul mate. Her stuff is exactly what I was looking for.

A golden mind stoops not to shows of dross.