Your past comes with you no matter where you go.

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.

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.

Sometimes when we think we’re protecting ourselves, we’re really hurting ourselves. And sometimes the people around us too.