Closeness can lead to emotions other than love. It's the ones who have been too intimate with you, lived in too close quarters, seen too much of your….

Opening things up not closing them off is my job. I'm doing that for my reader. You know, Bob Gottlieb always says, "Criticism is a service industry.….

The three most written-about subjects of all time are Jesus, the Civil War, and the Titanic..

The writers we absorb when we're young bind us to them, sometimes lightly, sometimes with iron. In time, the bonds fall away, but if you look very cl….

I love things that are brave enough to be nakedly about what our lives are actually built of, when you're wild about someone, or you love something, ….

I have nothing but great respect for great scholars. But I was in grad school in the '80s and '90s, at the height of the theory craziness. It had a b….

You come out of the gate, you've got something new, you're subversive, nobody's ever done it before. But by your fifth novel and your fourth literary….

What if The Odyssey has no more validity or authenticity than one of the other stories that you hear Odysseus telling? Whoever created The Odyssey wa….

We are living in an era of such interesting new forms, and certainly narrative non-fiction has emerged as a major form. People who are great writers ….

Repression is good for cultural achievement. Let's face it. What are gay boys going to be like? I always like to say the 19th-century gay boy was Osc….

Shopping as lifestyle is really a sub-cultural problem. When the strictures that set you apart or oppressed you, disappear, is there a way, legitimat….

Gay people, certainly gay people of my generation, at least of a certain echelon - middle-class Americans - have binocular vision. We all are raised ….

In the pre-Internet age you had to find gay things - or things that were slightly radioactive with erotic interest. You had to go to the library, you….

I would argue, for perspective's sake, that the arc of a really literary work is precisely that it both intensely reflects, and simultaneously transc….

Life is not bad, and it doesn't look more real if it's ugly or it's gritty. Think of your own life. Most of what's in your own life, hopefully, is ex….

I find that readers are very interested in how things are translated. I just turned in the first part of this father-son Odyssey, and there is a part….

I was interested in all kinds of things, whether it be Avatar, Mad Men, Troy, 300, Battlestar Gallactica, or the poems of Horace and Sappho. I always….