A Heart So White is simply one of the best novels I know. I'm also thrilled by Javier Marías sentences, by how elegant they are while also being so permissive in relation to the niceties of grammar and so open to the prospect of surprise. He's a genius.

The fact remains that books that really put gay people in the center, and especially books that do so in a way that is sexually explicit, tend not to get a great deal of mainstream attention: they don't tend to sell well, and they don't tend to win major awards. This makes the occasional exception, like Alan Hollinghurst, all the more remarkable.

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 hope that the relationship of the title to the novel [ What Belongs To You] gets more complex with each section of the book: that maybe it begins by resonating with the question of prostitution - to what extent can a body be commodified, what exactly are you renting or purchasing when you pay for sex - and deepens over the course of the book to address larger questions of ownership and belonging.

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

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.

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