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

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.

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

It does seem like between the groundbreaking writing of Edmund White's generation and the work of younger gay writers in their twenties and thirties there is a kind of gap.

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.

Being a high school teacher was wonderful, but unsustainable: I needed a way out.