I'd say it's never a challenge to present white and heteronormative privilege. The hard thing is to write any other way.

People wanted to get me published, and my early work was so weird that they weren't getting anywhere. I thought, okay, I'll do something that's just a tad more normal.

I wanted to hear my own whispers in the next room and know that I was thinking of me.

Human beings are just way more complex than they'd like to be. They like to be simple machines. And they'll set up fantasy scenarios where they're simple machines, and get hurt and do things they regret.

I have known many people who were seduced as children by same-sex partners and then spent their teen years being gay, and then found their way back to heterosexuality as adults.

What's important is the tolerance. If people are not beating other people up, or shooting them for being different, then that's progress. Even if the ideas that go through their head are fodder for novelists.

Whatever I was writing at the time, I knew there was no market for it and never would be, because there’s never a market for true art, so my main concern was always to have a job that didn’t require me to write or think.