There are lots of big books that have gay characters - or, more commonly, a gay character - in secondary roles, but seldom are their lives, and especially their sexual lives, on center stage.

Where the novel makes use of material from my life it does so because it's aesthetically convenient, not because of any allegiance it has to any verifiable facts.

Teaching high school was my real training as a novelist: it got me out of my head, and (at least a little) out of books, and invested me in the lives of others and the world around me.

I went back to graduate school because I wanted to avoid being a professional, to try to piece together a life that would let me avoid the tenure race and full-time teaching.

I am a gay writer, absolutely. And in no way does that fact limit the reach or importance of what I write.

Woolf is an important writer for me, someone I read often and who forms part of my ideal of what literature can do.

I take pleasure as a reader in books that tease with a kind of urgency of the real, even if it's only a manufactured effect.