None of us sees history fully; none of us is adequately aware of how the arrangements of the present moment foreclose the possibilities of others to fully live their only lives.

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.

There are lots of big books that have gay characters - or, more commonly, a gay character - in secondary roles, but seldom are their lives, and especially their sexual lives, on center stage.

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

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.

My first MFA was in poetry, and it was very much part of a professional trajectory leading to life as a professor. But in my second and third years at Harvard, I realized I didn't want an academic life.

I think one reason I'm drawn to expansive syntax is that arias are so often exercises in extending language as a means of intensifying feeling.