AIDS was one of those diseases that a lot of people tried to claim ownership over, and especially as someone who was, fortunately never HIV positive, I wanted to avoid any appearance of doing that.

Don't come to New York until you've finished a book. It's too expensive. You'll never write anything. You'll spend all your time working to pay the rent.

Art is only great if it's uncodifiable. If art isn't scaring you, if it's not making you upset, then I don't think it's actually doing anything.

I'm a novelist. I think fiction is important or I wouldn't be doing it, but most of it's bad.

Writing fiction is fundamentally an irrational act.

Who cares what the state thinks about your relationship? They're giving you tax breaks and this and that - it's just nonsense. You want to live with somebody, then live with somebody. All that other stuff is just a way for the state monitoring and codifying certain activities and ostracizing others.

Most contemporary fiction sucks. It's intellectually dishonest, often morally dishonest. It's cheap and easy. It pretends to be deep but is really quite shallow.