I realized that there was an intellectual content in music, a kind of thinking, that I would never be able to hear.

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

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

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.

Where the novel makes use of material from my life it does so because it's aesthetically convenient, not because of any allegiance it has to any verifiable facts.

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

I realized that there was an intellectual content in music, a kind of thinking, that I would never be able to hear.