Your life could be taken from you at any moment. Between AIDS and the violence against gay people that was so prevalent back then, you really didn't feel like you were living in the United States of America, in a first world country. You had a sense that life was a precious commodity you had to fight to keep.

Most people who are HIV positive are on drugs and that gets their viral load so low that it's harder to transmit it. Most new infections come from people who don't know they're infected.

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

Your past comes with you no matter where you go.

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.

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.