Most of the people of this world are coated round and round with self-esteem, and they're afraid to admit any understanding of the things which aren't good.

Chicago is many things to many people, and to me, it is a place where you can write.

I'm an American. We've translated democracy and brotherhood and equality into enterprise and opportunity and success - and that's getting Americanised.

I admire Virginia Woolf so much that I wonder why I don't like her more. She makes the inner things real, she does illumine, and she makes relationships realities as well as people. But I remember the intensity, the thrill, with which I read 'Passage to India.' How I would have hated anyone who took the book away from me.

Very conscious of the fact that an effort was being made to destroy my mind, because I was deprived of books, deprived of any means of writing, deprived of human companionship. You never know how much you need it until you're deprived of it.

I grew up here in New York City and New Jersey, performing on Broadway shows, surrounded by some of my closest friends from the LGBT community. My father, a minister from New Jersey, shaped my view that love is love, that we are all equal.

Growing up, sports was my outlet, my way to portray a personality. I was very shy around people but, through sports, something I was good at, I was able to make friends.

The relationship between the imagined and the real is more complicated than people imagine.