Hell is God's Absence.

If I take a less defensive tone, I'd admit that I couldn't write today a very jazzy, contemporary look at America as I did in 1979 in States of Desire.

The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure.

The scorn directed against drags is especially virulent; they have become the outcasts of gay life, the "queers" of homosexuality.In fact, they are classic scapegoats. Our old fears about our sissiness, still with us though masked by the new macho fascism, are now located, isolated, quarantined through our persecution of the transvestite.

Marie Calloway has a very specific literary personality that the reader is intrigued by: she's masochistic, loves to experiment, is quickly bored and intermittently self-hating, very hip, rebellious. Figuring her out is a gripping adventure.

I saw literature as a fantasy, no less absorbing for all its irrelevance - a parallel life, as dreams shadow waking but never intersect it.

Hell is God's Absence.