When I was growing up, I kept hoping that I wasn't really gay because I wanted to have children. I went through a long, tortured period, so the fact that I have been able to be true to myself and have a family has been the nicest surprise of my adulthood.

Writing 'The Noonday Demon' turned me into a professional depressive, which is a weird thing to be. A class at the university I attended assigns the book and invited me to be a guest lecturer.

We think that fear must be played out in fight, with military intervention, or in flight, via isolationism - but we are not hunted game, and those are not the only options. There is also the possibility of acceptance, with its corollary of understanding and its ultimate manifestation in embracing.

Forging meaning is about changing yourself. Building identity is about changing the world.

When someone's a writer, it's very creative and moody, and you think of someone walking around the office in pajamas thinking of ideas.

Athens is an amazing city for creativity. I bought a house there. A little, tiny place.

There's a particular sensitivity required to be an artist, and a certain vulnerability, perhaps, and also, somewhere between, you're in your body a lot, too. It's much more physical than one would imagine because I think it's the body where the imagination lives somehow. I do feel the imagination isn't just in the brain up there.

The idea of love as a mysterious, undiscovered world has come to have no place in our innermost imagination.