I felt a lot of ambivalence about going back to graduate school for a second MFA. The impulse was really the opposite from what it had been more than a decade before: I wanted to interrupt a career.

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

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

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

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.

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