I treat people who write me the way my friends and I all treat each other when we go to each other for advice, which is sometimes with supreme cruelty. I think that's what helps the advice sink in. If somebody comes at you with both barrels, the first shot opens your head, and the second shot allows the advice to get lodged inside.

A lot of kids are bullied because of their sexual identity or expression. It's often the effeminate boys and the masculine girls, the ones who violate gender norms and expectations, who get bullied.

When you're a writer, you want to try to avoid cliches. Unfortunately, when you're writing about marriage or family, all cliches seem to apply.

So while gun owners are always saying that owning guns is about defending freedom, the only freedom gun owners seem interested in defending with their guns is the freedom to defend their freedom to own guns.

Natural isn't something I get called a lot in Texas.

You could fly under the radar a little bit. You could be a weird kid without defaulting to gay, without everyone assuming you must be gay - that was literally the last place many people went.

And that really captures the difference for the bullied straight kid versus the bullied gay kid, is that the bullied straight kid goes home to a shoulder to cry on and support and can talk freely about his experience at school and why he's being bullied. [...] And I couldn't go home and open up to my parents.