I'm not sure I can articulate any principles behind the decisions about what to cut and what to keep.

For me, music was always a second language. I didn't have a musical background, and I started studying very late, at fourteen.

I'm still primarily interested in observing as closely as possible the shifting weather between people. I think the master of this sort of thing, and a writer who has meant a great deal to me, is Henry James: there's a magical way that he has of turning the slightest gesture into a whole world of drama and feeling.

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

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.

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.

I guess I've done a lot of different kinds of performing at various times - opera singing, poetry reading, not least high school teaching - and I do enjoy it, at least sometimes. But I find it incredibly anxiety-producing and exhausting. Privacy is more congenial, and I go a little crazy if I can't spend a big chunk of every day, or almost every day, alone. Certainly I have to be alone to write.