Of course the success of A Boy's Own Story took me utterly off guard.

I didn't want to write a biographie romancee especially since I already write novels, nor did I want to challenge the rules of the biography game, arbitrary as those rules might be.

As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excuse me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm an identity I was unhappily piecing together.

I think that there are empty ecological niches in the literary landscape crying to be filled and when a book more or less fills a niche it's seized on, even when it's a far from perfect fit.

Like many hard-bitten cynics, he cried easily and was always falling into fluttery love with his type, clean-cut Yalies.

There is an enormous pressure placed on gay novelists because they are the only spokespeople. The novelist’s first obligation is to be true to his own vision, not to be some sort of common denominator or public relations man to all gay people.

I’m sorry,” Billy says, “but I felt it was too organized. I like ellipses and teeny jottings and spontaneous poems and particularly all those devices like long lists of melancholy things.

For me a current lover has always been like whatever current book I’m writing – an obsessive project orienting all my thoughts.

I felt if I went chronologically, I’d get bogged down in childhood and that’s part of our culture of complaint in America. This endless wailing about your childhood.

For these people religion is the only form of intellectuality.