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.

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

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.

My social status in the last year has gone from zero to hero.

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.

In the rural South, the only interesting people were the sexual deviants. Everybody else was able to be part of the mainstream, and could find a way somehow.

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.