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. History is never invisible, finally, though some people seem to work very hard to be willfully blind. That's too harsh, or too self-righteous: 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.

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 guess I think that sex and desire and humiliation are central to my experience of consciousness - to my experience of humanness - and I wanted to explore the ways that they circle around and approach and fail to add up to love, or the ways that those three terms - sex, desire, love - can in some lights seem synonymous and in others like elements entirely alien to one another.

I studied opera, and when I left conservatory I told myself I would never sing in public again.

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

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.

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