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.

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.

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.

Stuck in a generation where loyalty is just a tattoo, love is just a quote and lying is the new truth.

We are here in this world for each other.

If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things

Listen, I am someone who had chosen to earn their daily bread killing other people. I'm inclined to give people a bit of leeway when it comes to their actions and decisions.

Life as we find it is too hard for us it entails too much pain too many disappointments impossible tasks. We cannot do without palliative remedies.

The Japanese banks are not having an easy time as they once had.

It was like having a box of chocolates shut in the bedroom drawer. Until the box was empty it occupied the mind too much.

And forever goodbye! Forever! Oh, Sir, can you imagine how dreadful this cruel word sounds when one loves?

At Jaffa in Syria and among the Nomads in Arabia, are lakes of enormous size that yield very large masses of asphalt, which are carried off by the inhabitants thereabouts.

As an actor you have to wait for someone to cast you, so you're relying on the business.