None of us sees history fully; none of us is adequately aware of how the arrangements of the present moment foreclose the possibilities of others to fully live their only lives.

I guess I think that sex and desire and humiliation are central to my experience of consciousness - to my experience of humanness - and I wanted to explore the ways that they circle around and approach and fail to add up to love, or the ways that those three terms - sex, desire, love - can in some lights seem synonymous and in others like elements entirely alien to one another.

A Heart So White is simply one of the best novels I know. I'm also thrilled by Javier Marías sentences, by how elegant they are while also being so permissive in relation to the niceties of grammar and so open to the prospect of surprise. He's a genius.

I think history is only ever invisible when it abets your sense of self, your desires, your ambitions, when it carries your life along in a kind of frictionless way.

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.

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.

None of us sees history fully; none of us is adequately aware of how the arrangements of the present moment foreclose the possibilities of others to fully live their only lives.