The AIDS epidemic has rolled back a big rotting log and revealed all the squirming life underneath it, since it involves, all at once, the main theme….

Marie Calloway has a very specific literary personality that the reader is intrigued by: she's masochistic, loves to experiment, is quickly bored and….

I think sincerity was my sole aesthetic and realism my experimental technique..

I am, I must confess, suspicious of those who denounce others for having too much sex. At what point does a healthy amount become too much? There are….

Ive always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience..

Perhaps we'd understood each other too well to be attracted to one another. There were no occlusions in communication, those breaks in understanding ….

I'd rather come back with a few transcendent memories than an album of snapshots..

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….

How thrilling to discover one had depths, how consoling to find them less polluted than the shallows, how encouraging to identify the enemy not as a ….

Tennessee Williams recognized that great theater begins with great talkers, and that great talkers obey two rules: they never sound like anyone else ….

Do we regard language as more public, more ceremonial, than thought? Just as family men condemn the profanity on the stage that they use constantly i….

Perhaps I became so vague, so exhilarated with vagueness, precisely in order to forestall a recognition of the final term of the syllogism that begin….

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 o….

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….

When we are young... we often experience things in the present with a nostalgia-in-advance, but we seldom guess what we will truly prize years from n….

At certain crucial moments - an emergency or an opportunity - one must act first and think later..

The imagination is not the consolation people pretend. It can even be regarded as the admission of some sort of failure..

Biography can be the most middle-class of all forms, the judgment of little people avenging themselves on the great..

The most important things in our intimate lives can't be discussed with strangers, except in books..

Paris... is a world meant for the walker alone, for only the pace of strolling can take in all the rich (if muted) detail..

I still feel that sincerity and realism are avant-garde, or can be, just as I did when I started out..