I do think that calling a book nonfiction affirms a kind of responsibility to an attempt at truth.

It does seem like between the groundbreaking writing of Edmund White's generation and the work of younger gay writers in their twenties and thirties there is a kind of gap.

Writing the novel felt so private to me! I think publishing a novel is quite public and exposing, and what's a little frightening to me right now is the fact that it feels so entirely opposed to the privacy that is writing.

I'm not sure any narrative model has been more important for me than Benjamin Britten's chamber operas.

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.

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.

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.