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

Being a high school teacher was wonderful, but unsustainable: I needed a way out.

Whenever I go to New York I try to soak up as much live music as I can, including as many nights at the opera as I can manage.

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

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.

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.