Silly humans. Banging on a tub to make a bear dance when we would move the stars to pity.

You want to give him the book of his own life, the book that will locate him, parent him, arm him for the changes.

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.

Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I'm finishing, even if it's turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don't admit it, they're not being honest.

He insists on a version of you that is funnier, stranger, more eccentric and prfound thatn you suspect yourself to be--capable of doing more good and more harm in the world than you've ever imagined--it is all but impossible not to believe, at least in his presence and a while after you've left him, that he alone sees through your essence, weighs your true qualities . . . and appreciates you more fully than anyone else ever has.

Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.

What she wants to say has to do not only with joy but with the penetrating, constant fear that is joy's other half.