Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.

You could say I don't want for me be seen primarily as a gay writer. I've never hidden my sexuality. It matters that I'm gay, it matters that I'm white, it matters that I'm male, it matters that I'm American. But basically it's just less and less of a big deal.

The lives great artists live and the books they write are two very different things.

I love movies, I love television, I love narratives of all kinds.

These days, Clarissa believes, you measure people first by their kindness and their capacity for devotion. You get tired, sometimes, of wit and intellect; everybody's little display of genius.

Here is the world, and you live in it, and are grateful. You try to be grateful.

Accept that, like many men, you have a streak of the homoerotic in you. Why would you, why would anyone, want to be that straight?