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.

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 one reason I'm drawn to expansive syntax is that arias are so often exercises in extending language as a means of intensifying feeling.

History is never invisible, finally, though some people seem to work very hard to be willfully blind.

Bulgaria is a fascinating, beautiful, difficult country, and I fell in love with it.

I realized that there was an intellectual content in music, a kind of thinking, that I would never be able to hear.

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.