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.

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

I guess I've done a lot of different kinds of performing at various times - opera singing, poetry reading, not least high school teaching - and I do enjoy it, at least sometimes. But I find it incredibly anxiety-producing and exhausting. Privacy is more congenial, and I go a little crazy if I can't spend a big chunk of every day, or almost every day, alone. Certainly I have to be alone to write.

My first MFA was in poetry, and it was very much part of a professional trajectory leading to life as a professor. But in my second and third years at Harvard, I realized I didn't want an academic life.

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 am a gay writer, absolutely. And in no way does that fact limit the reach or importance of what I write.