I realized, that the life of a musician, even of a very lucky, very successful musician, wasn't really the life I wanted: I hate travel, I hate living out of suitcases, I hate the constant anxiety of being on stage.

The academy is an incredibly sheltered world, and I do think it's important for writers to get out from under that shelter, at least for a while, to see what the world looks like from outside it.

I went back to graduate school because I wanted to avoid being a professional, to try to piece together a life that would let me avoid the tenure race and full-time teaching.

Bulgaria is a fascinating, beautiful, difficult country, and I fell in love with it.

My life has had a lot of fits and starts: before I studied literature at all I was a musician, and began undergrad as a conservatory student. I started studying literature in my third year of college, when I took a poetry course with James Longenbach that was pretty extraordinary. It changed my life.

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.

Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do.