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.

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.

She smiles, and her eyes look as if they can see back into her memory, into all the things that have gone into making a person what they are.

Thought moves like a dissociation of leaves across a lawn in a breeze.

If You Lose Your Keys, At Least It's Better Than Losing Your Car.

What can we do to win these men to Christ?

Scratch a lover and find a foe.

You know one little way in which baseball changes us? We don't even think twice about Japanese names anymore. You know what I mean?

When cheese gets its picture taken, what does it say?

I achieved what I want to achieve and I want to continue doing something else.

What you don’t know can be your greatest asset.

There is no substitute for excellence. Not even success.