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'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.

I take pleasure as a reader in books that tease with a kind of urgency of the real, even if it's only a manufactured effect.

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. History is never invisible, finally, though some people seem to work very hard to be willfully blind. That's too harsh, or too self-righteous: 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.

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.

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

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.