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.

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

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

I'm drawn to fiction that hints at nonfiction, that blurs or seems to blur the boundaries between invention and autobiography.

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

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.