Half of what's wrong with people today is that they ain't got no place to go that makes them peaceful.

You have to find a way of shutting the future out and focusing on the writing. One of the problems I'll have with writing my second book is getting back into a situation where I think about the words on the page rather than the publishing industry, or success, or any kind of readership I may now have. I'll have to do what writers do, which is focus on the story and nothing else.

I'm wary of being put in boxes. But at the same time, it's important that I embrace my identity as a writer who happens to be gay, and in my own way I do that.

I think that people have some sort of vision that everybody is moving towards perfection, and that there is some sort of set steps or something like that that you can move through to get to that place, and that that's sort of the project of being alive.

I think that the project of being alive is to be alive. So there will always be twists and turns and steps forward and steps back, but that's just your life. There is no sort of place at which to arrive, and I think that the more one focuses on an end point, the harder it is to get there. It's like the horizon, sort of ever receding, ever receding, ever receding.

I really, deeply believe in the primacy of character. I believe that my job as a writer is to put a believable human being on a page.

Even if you don't feel like sitting down to write or working on that big proposal, or whatever it is, just show up anyhow and the rest will follow.