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.

If my novel gets any attention in Bulgaria, it will be as a scandal: a book about a teacher at a famous school and his relationship with a prostitute. I doubt very much it will be evaluated on its merits as literature. If Bulgarian were the book's only language, that would be painful and limiting to me as a writer. Since my book also exists in English - where it isn't scandalous at all - I feel comfortable with the possibility of scandal.

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

I'm not sure I can articulate any principles behind the decisions about what to cut and what to keep.

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.

Teaching high school was my real training as a novelist: it got me out of my head, and (at least a little) out of books, and invested me in the lives of others and the world around me.

I guess I've done a lot of different kinds of performing at various times - opera singing, poetry reading, not least high school teaching - and I do enjoy it, at least sometimes. But I find it incredibly anxiety-producing and exhausting. Privacy is more congenial, and I go a little crazy if I can't spend a big chunk of every day, or almost every day, alone. Certainly I have to be alone to write.