I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break.
I hated historical novels with fluttering cloaks.
Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.
Quest is at the heart of what I do-the holy grail, and the terror that you'll never find it, seemed a perfect metaphor for life.
I didn't mind being unpopular at school, because everyone else was a heathen.
I think heterosexuality and homosexuality are a kind of psychosis, and the truth is somewhere in the middle.
I hate the word lesbian; it tells you nothing; its only purpose is to inflame.
Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.
To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.
However it is debased or misinterpreted, love is a redemptive feature. To focus on one individual so that their desires become superior to yours is a very cleansing experience.
Ordinary professionalism and 20 years' experience can accomplish a lot, but it can't access the hidden places.
I'm not a quitter.
With animal behavior, they're all fine until you introduce some rogue element into the cage, and then they go crazy.
Always in my books, I like to throw that rogue element into a stable situation and then see what happens.
Nobody knows anything about Shakespeare the person. It's all legend, it is all rumor.
Art saved me; it got me through my depression and self-loathing, back to a place of innocence.
The truth is that love smashes into your life like an ice floe, and even if your heart is built like the Titanic you go down.