I think the suicides in my first book came from the idea of growing up in Detroit. If you grow up in a city like that you feel everything is perishing, evanescent and going away very quickly.

I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history.

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'

Basically you come up with the fictional idea and you start writing that story, but then in order to write it and to make it seem real, you sometimes put your own memories in. Even if it's a character that's very different from you.

My belief is that my wife should be at home looking after my kids and cooking and cleaning. She's a very privileged woman to have a husband like me. Not everyone's in her position, but the ones who are are very lucky. That's my opinion.

I don't think I'm romantic at all. I have a lot of faith in the right thing happening. I don't really hope for a lot of particulars, I just have faith that the right thing will happen most of the time.

I think there's a kind of love relationship between an actor and an audience, and this is something I really feel with the audiences in France.

I never thought my marriage could be stronger, or I could be closer to Bill. We prayed on our own, but now we prayed together and you'll never know how much that means until you do it.