the whole point of literature, I think, is that it’s the best technology we have for communicating what another person’s life feels like from the inside.

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.

If you get NO as an answer, remember, N.O means Next Opportunity.

Books measure time in both moments and years. We all grow old but the stories never will.

Your life oppositions will position or disposition you in the best or worst way depending how you position or disposition your oppositions.

Seeing's believing - but feeling is God's own truth.

To all those who lead monotonous lives in the hope that they may experience at second hand the delights and dangers of adventure. [author's dedication]

It is really the mistake of our age. We think it is enough to discover new things, but we don't realize that knowing more demands a cor­responding development of morality.

To shut yourself from history is to shut yourself off from say music or painting or the theatre, literature for the rest of your life. It would be to cheat yourself of the pleasures of life.

It's an article of faith in Tinseltown: when liberals get mired in scandal, it's because they are tragically flawed; when conservatives get in trouble, it's because they are evil.

With technology and social media and citizen journalism, every rock that used to go unturned is now being flipped, lit and put on TV.

The great political questions are in their final analysis great moral questions.