No one I interact with - except maybe for family and strangers at the Russian baths and other weird places I may go to - is just friends or lovers with me: they also know something of my writing and this distorts their take on me.

People don't expect too much from literature. They just want to know they're not alone with being confused.

I don't really know the person who wrote the things I wrote. I kind of know him, but I change so much all the time that it's like I start fresh over and over and over and over. Writing-wise and life-wise.

I promote my own self-hatred.

There are so many talented young writers named Jonathan, with whom by comparison I suffer terribly.

I'm also not sure that I look up to others as knowing what the hell is going on, except maybe Andre Agassi, who, when I interviewed him, while covering the U.S. Open, seemed to know what was going on. My basic assumption is that we're all confused all the time. Some people do act more confident, though. Maybe they aren't confused. I am. I'm confused.

Whenever I wrote fiction, people always seemed to think that what I wrote was true, that it was entirely autobiographical. And when I would write non-fiction, they often accused me of exaggeration and fictionalization.