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.

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'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 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.

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

Writing the novel felt so private to me! I think publishing a novel is quite public and exposing, and what's a little frightening to me right now is the fact that it feels so entirely opposed to the privacy that is writing.