I just enjoy lying on the couch and reading a magazine.

Scream at the mangled leather carcass lying at the foot of the stairs, and my parents would roar with laughter. "That's what you get for leaving your wallet on the kitchen table.

I started writing when I was twenty. My first book came out when I was thirty-five. But I never expected that it would happen quickly.

I am a person who feels guilty for crimes I have not committed, or have not committed in years. The police search the train station for a serial rapist and I cover my face with a newspaper, wondering if maybe I did it in my sleep. The last thing I stole was an eight-track tape, but to this day I'm unable to enter a store without feeling like a shoplifter. It's all the anxiety with none of the free stuff.

I would be writing and trying to write like Joan Didion. Or if I was reading Raymond Carver. You know, strong stylists. But that's how you find your voice, is imitating other people. So things like that didn't embarrass me, because I thought, well, that's how it goes. That's how everyone learns.

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."

In Japanese and Italian, the response to ["How are you?"] is "I'm fine, and you?" In German it's answered with a sigh and a slight pause, followed by "Not so good.