Stacey D'Erasmo

As lightly toned by reality as the women on 'Sex and the City,' the bold, soigne characters on 'The L Word' suggest that L is also for limerence, that rapturous state of early love when the entire world is glowing and delectable.

As for me, I've been in love with women and men. I get how people fall in love with different kinds of people, but to fall in love with God: I didn't get that.

Of course, a secret is no good if it doesn't need to be a secret.

I write things in my house, and hopefully there's a reader out there who enjoys it and has an experience with it, but that's very different than a performer on stage, where there's an immediate dance with the audience. It's incredibly powerful.

Visibility is a tricky thing; is someone visible when you can point her out in a crowd, or when you understand what her life feels like to her?

Writers and musicians are very similar in that the chances of making a life in either field are so infinitesimal. And once you're in, the chances of staying viable are difficult. But there is something incredibly different about performing in front of a live audience, as opposed to sitting at your desk typing.

The songs in 'Wonderland' don't have a melodic life for me - I'm not a musical person - but they have an emotional life, an emotional echo perhaps.

A touring band is a family and a workplace at the same time, and you're living with people you didn't necessarily choose every day for up to a year.

The spirits of Havelock Ellis, Magnus Hirschfeld and Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebbing waft through the text to lend 'The Third Sex' an air of scientific authority.

The deeper changes wrought by the end of a particular outlaw culture: something will come of that ... and it won't be what we expect.

Shelley Jackson's 'Half Life' is the textual equivalent of an installation, a multivocal, polymorphous, dialogic, dystopian satire wrapped around a murder mystery wrapped around a bildungsroman.

I never thought much about God, certainly never wondered whether God was thinking about me, until I fell in love with a Zen Buddhist priest.