High school taught me a valuable lesson about glasses: Don't wear them. Contacts have always seemed like too much work, so instead I just squint, figuring that if something is more than ten feet away, I'll just deal with it when I get there.

People discuss their relationships all the time, but you can't. I don't think people realize how harmful that is, how it twists you up to hide who you are. It's not healthy, and the great gains that homosexuals have made in my lifetime, I think that we'll look back in twenty or thirty years and say, "I can't believe we ever made them go through that."

As bad a dresser as I am, anything beats being judged by my character.

A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.

I'm not a reporter but the 'New Yorker' treats everyone like a reporter.

I wish that I had re-edited 'Theft By Finding' after I did the audio. Because the audio took 40 hours in the studio, and I was standing on my feet. So toward the end of it I'd be looking at certain diary entries and I would think, "Is this really worth my time to read this out loud?" And I would think, "No, it is not." I would have cut out 75 pages, just because I was tired of standing up.

They were Jesuits," she told me. "That means they believe in God but not in terlet paper. You should have seen their underwear. Disgusting.