I always give money to a sidewalk con if the story is a good one, even if I don't believe a word of it. Art deserves to get paid.

Many writers and artists portrayed the poor sympathetically, and even fought on their behalf, but they themselves were not of that class. Gay life is perhaps even more subject to ambiguity, since it so often involves crossing classes.

I wasn't born in New York and I may never live there again, and just thinking about it makes me melancholy, but I was changed forever by it, my imagination is manacled to it, and I wear its mark the way you wear a scar. Whatever happens, whether I like it or not, New York City is fated always to remain my home.

Subjectivity is my middle name, a trick memory is my pack mule, and self-contradiction is my trusty old jackknife.

I always give money to a sidewalk con if the story is a good one, even if I don't believe a word of it. Art deserves to get paid.

When I was a child I did engage in an arduous struggle to pass: learning English, getting rid of my accent, becoming conversant with the culture in all its large and small aspects.

Redheaded Peckerwood, which unerringly walks the fine line between fiction and nonfiction, is a disturbingly beautiful narrative about unfathomable violence and its place on the land