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

History is never invisible, finally, though some people seem to work very hard to be willfully blind.

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.

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

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 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.