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.

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

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

A Heart So White is simply one of the best novels I know. I'm also thrilled by Javier Marías sentences, by how elegant they are while also being so permissive in relation to the niceties of grammar and so open to the prospect of surprise. He's a genius.

I studied opera, and when I left conservatory I told myself I would never sing in public again.

I'm still primarily interested in observing as closely as possible the shifting weather between people. I think the master of this sort of thing, and a writer who has meant a great deal to me, is Henry James: there's a magical way that he has of turning the slightest gesture into a whole world of drama and feeling.