Quotes from Garth Greenwell

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.

Being a high school teacher was wonderful, but unsustainable: I needed a way out.

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.

Where the novel makes use of material from my life it does so because it's aesthetically convenient, not because of any allegiance it has to any verifiable facts.

I think history is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way.

I went back to graduate school because I wanted to avoid being a professional, to try to piece together a life that would let me avoid the tenure race and full-time teaching.

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

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

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

Even though I don't sing any more, singing was my first education in the arts, and it's clear to me that my training as a musician also shaped me as a writer.