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

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.

One night I had a dream and woke up and wrote down the dream. That was my first short story. The dream was a kind of fantasy of me getting revenge on my father.

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.

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

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.

Because gay people were so much more visible, violence against gays was more common and reported on. But they were definitely related to each other. In the wake of AIDS, gay people felt like they had to organize, become much more active and visible. AIDS fostered a gay rights movement that made gay people more powerful and more vulnerable at the same time.