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

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.

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.

I do think that calling a book nonfiction affirms a kind of responsibility to an attempt at truth.

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

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.

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