Even in the tragedies, Shakespeare always put in parts for the comic actors because his audience was mixed. He puts in people who talk like aristocrats. He puts in idiots and fools. He puts in certain middle-range characters. And when you go to the Globe, you realize how that all works. The people who paid more sat in seats around the edge. Everybody else paid a penny. They put it into a tin box - that's why we call it the "box office." They stood in the pit, but they were very close, so when Hamlet was doing his soliloquy, it was addressed to you, the audience - right there.

It's rather useless to write a gripping narrative with nothing in it but climate change because novels are always about people even if they purport to be about rabbits or robots.

Teaching other people to write is not something I can do. The only kind of advice I can give them will be trite by its nature. Of course, read a lot, write a lot. The kind of advice I wish I had been given is all of a practical nature, having to do with publishers and agents.

The facts of this world seen clearly are seen through tears.

All observations of life are harsh, because life is. I lament that fact, but I cannot change it.

When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss. I study their hands lifting the cigarettes in the darkness of the movie theaters, the slope of a shoulder, the angle of a hip. Looking at them sideways, I examine them in different lights. My love for them is visual: that is the part of them I would like to possess. Don’t move, I think. Stay like that, let me have that.

Knowledge is power only as long as you keep your mouth shut.