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.

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.

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.

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

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 by resonating with the question of prostitution - to what extent can a body be commodified, what exactly are you renting or purchasing when you pay for sex - and deepens over the course of the book to address larger questions of ownership and belonging.

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