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.

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 explore the ways that they circle around and approach and fail to add up to love, or the ways that those three terms - sex, desire, love - can in some lights seem synonymous and in others like elements entirely alien to one another.

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.

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.

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 living out of suitcases, I hate the constant anxiety of being on stage.

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 see what the world looks like from outside it.