History is never invisible, finally, though some people seem to work very hard to be willfully blind.

Even though I don't sing any more, singing was my first education in the arts, and it's clear to me that my training as a musician also shaped me as a writer.

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

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

I take pleasure as a reader in books that tease with a kind of urgency of the real, even if it's only a manufactured effect.

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.

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.