Losing my virginity was very boring.

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.

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

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.

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.

If anything I urge you to live bravely and beyond your own comfort zone.

Life is but a sleep disturbed By dreaming

I prefer to be left alone with my books.

When people are not aiming for anything in particular or when they cannot monitor their performance, there is little basis for translating perceived efficacy into appropriate magnitudes of effort

I've observed a few things about the few really great people I've had a chance to meet and cover...They need to be around people. You and I require sleep. They require people.

To sin offers repentance and forgiveness; not to sin offers only punishment.

My hair is such a statement that it's like a neon sign asking for trouble.

By the way, Howard Zinn's History of America is front and center at the gift shop of the New York Historical Society. The New York Historical Society is deluged with school kids on a daily basis.

In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings.