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

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.

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

I think it's harder to avoid reflection on those larger patterns of history or society when they so insistently call into question your right to exist.

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

I often say that Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, and Javier Marías are my stylistic holy trinity, prose writers who amaze me with their notation of consciousness and voice.

For me, music was always a second language. I didn't have a musical background, and I started studying very late, at fourteen.