“It wasn't easy telling my family that I'm gay. I made my carefully worded announcement at Thanksgiving. It was very Norman Rockwell. I said, 'Mom, would you please pass the gravy to a homosexual?' She passed it to my father. A terrible scene followed.”
“...if you're an artist, you've submitted to authority...”
“If a man treats life artistically, his brain is his heart”
“To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.”
“Added to the moral solitude of the murderer comes the solitude of the artist, which can acknowledge no authority, save that of another artist.”