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 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.

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.

Teaching high school was my real training as a novelist: it got me out of my head, and (at least a little) out of books, and invested me in the lives of others and the world around me.

I don't think I'm qualified to answer questions about happiness. But I guess I'd say that I don't think you ever get to put to bed something like a search for order, or any other element of your sensibility, however much you'd like to.

None of us sees history fully; none of us is adequately aware of how the arrangements of the present moment foreclose the possibilities of others to fully live their only lives.

If my novel gets any attention in Bulgaria, it will be as a scandal: a book about a teacher at a famous school and his relationship with a prostitute. I doubt very much it will be evaluated on its merits as literature. If Bulgarian were the book's only language, that would be painful and limiting to me as a writer. Since my book also exists in English - where it isn't scandalous at all - I feel comfortable with the possibility of scandal.