I think it's harder to avoid reflection on those larger patterns of history or society when they so insistently call into question your right to exist.

I think it's harder to avoid reflection on those larger patterns of history or society when they so insistently call into question your right to exist.

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.

It does seem like between the groundbreaking writing of Edmund White's generation and the work of younger gay writers in their twenties and thirties there is a kind of gap.

I often say that Bernhard, W.G. Sebald, and Javier Marías are my stylistic holy trinity, prose writers who amaze me with their notation of consciousness and voice.

When I took my first poetry class, I felt that I could understand the relationships between words and the formal qualities of language in a way I would never understand music.

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