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.

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.

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.

im in love with you and im not in the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things.

My faith has wavered but has saved me.

Animation isn't the illusion of life; it is life

When I'm acting, I've always got to make it make sense to me why I do anything. Whether it's right or wrong, I've just got to believe this is the reason why I am doing this and just go with it.

Yoga has stopped me from destroying my joints after running. It slows me down. My brain and body can go into overdrive - yoga teaches me to focus on the moment and not get ahead of myself.

I thought ‘I wonder what will happen if I try and root myself somewhere?‘ Look back over the past eight years.

But, however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive.

The moment of recognizing your own lack of talent is a flash of genius.

Living is having ups and downs and sharing them with friends.

Limitation makes the creative mind inventive.