Whenever I go to New York I try to soak up as much live music as I can, including as many nights at the opera as I can manage..

I guess I think that sex and desire and humiliation are central to my experience of consciousness - to my experience of humanness - and I wanted to e….

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 the sense of being opposed to the present moment, that sense of the rub of history, invigorates the writing I find most exciting, and….

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….

I realized, that the life of a musician, even of a very lucky, very successful musician, wasn't really the life I wanted: I hate travel, I hate livin….

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 a….

Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do..

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 rac….

For me, music was always a second language. I didn't have a musical background, and I started studying very late, at fourteen..

I'm not sure I can articulate any principles behind the decisions about what to cut and what to keep..

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'm not sure any narrative model has been more important for me than Benjamin Britten's chamber operas..

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 wou….

Writing the novel felt so private to me! I think publishing a novel is quite public and exposing, and what's a little frightening to me right now is ….

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

I hope that the relationship of the title to the novel [ What Belongs To You] gets more complex with each section of the book: that maybe it begins b….

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 ….

I'm drawn to fiction that hints at nonfiction, that blurs or seems to blur the boundaries between invention and autobiography..

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 ….

There are lots of big books that have gay characters - or, more commonly, a gay character - in secondary roles, but seldom are their lives, and espec….