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

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

I do think that the sense of being opposed to the present moment, that sense of the rub of history, invigorates the writing I find most exciting, and maybe precisely in being equally allegiant to an inward fineness of sensibility and an outward-facing rigor of protest or critique.

I am a gay writer, absolutely. And in no way does that fact limit the reach or importance of what I write.

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

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.