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.

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

I do think that calling a book nonfiction affirms a kind of responsibility to an attempt at truth.

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 one reason I'm drawn to expansive syntax is that arias are so often exercises in extending language as a means of intensifying feeling.

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 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. History is never invisible, finally, though some people seem to work very hard to be willfully blind. That's too harsh, or too self-righteous: 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.