I've been keeping diaries for 27 years.

Maybe one day, I would write a story about arguing in public, and those would come in handy in some way.

What I really hated, of course, was my mind. There must have been an off switch somewhere, but I was damned if I could find it.

The good thing about being gay, though, I always believed, is that you didn't make anyone go to a wedding. Nobody wants to go to a wedding. Nobody. It kind of bothers me now that you have to go to gay weddings, too. I don't care. It's still a wedding. And I would give anybody double gifts if they would elope.

I don't think my life is more interesting than anybody else's.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

The walking tour guides one through the city's various landmarks, reciting bits of information the listener might find enlightening. I learned, for example, that in the late 1500s my little neighborhood square was a popular spot for burning people alive. Now lined with a row of small shops, the tradition continues, though in a figurative rather than literal sense.