I'm a novelist. I think fiction is important or I wouldn't be doing it, but most of it's bad.

Most people who are HIV positive are on drugs and that gets their viral load so low that it's harder to transmit it. Most new infections come from people who don't know they're infected.

Your past comes with you no matter where you go.

Sometimes when we think we’re protecting ourselves, we’re really hurting ourselves. And sometimes the people around us too.

Writing fiction is fundamentally an irrational act.

Most contemporary fiction sucks. It's intellectually dishonest, often morally dishonest. It's cheap and easy. It pretends to be deep but is really quite shallow.

Don't come to New York until you've finished a book. It's too expensive. You'll never write anything. You'll spend all your time working to pay the rent.

One night I had a dream and woke up and wrote down the dream. That was my first short story. The dream was a kind of fantasy of me getting revenge on my father.

AIDS was one of those diseases that a lot of people tried to claim ownership over, and especially as someone who was, fortunately never HIV positive, I wanted to avoid any appearance of doing that.

Losing my virginity was very boring.

Art is only great if it's uncodifiable. If art isn't scaring you, if it's not making you upset, then I don't think it's actually doing anything.

Run your own race of life, with a single minded vision of purpos

Hitler: Thank you, whoever you are. I think you just saved my life.The Doctor: Believe me... It was an accident.

Accepting the reality of our sinfulness means accepting our authentic self. Judas could not face his shadow

No phrase can convey the idea of surprise so vividly as opening the eyes and raising the eyebrows. A shrug of the shoulders would lose much by translation into words.

The way to love someone is to lightly run your finger over that person's soul until you find a crack, and then gently pour your love into that crack.

Invent. I love inventing, that's my first passion.

There are limits to reforming a system that is dominated by these massive and rapacious corporations.

That to me is the basic message of events like the rise of Nazism, the Salem witch trials, and so on: not that bad people do bad things, but that good people do bad things.