A Writer Should Always Feel Like He's

If She Were Religious, She Would Call It The Soul. It Is More Than The Sum Of Her Intellect And Her Emotions, More Than The Sum Of Her Experiences, Though It Runs Like Veins Of Brilliant Metal Through All Three. It Is An Inner Faculty That Recognizes The Animating Mysteries Of The World Because It Is Made Of The Same Substance

We Throw Our Parties; We Abandon Our Families To Live Alone In Canada; We Struggle To Write Books That Do Not Change The World, Despite Our Gifts And Our Unstinting Efforts, Our Most Extravagant Hopes. We Live Our Lives, Do Whatever We Do, And Then We Sleep--it's As Simple And Ordinary As That. A Few Jump Out Of Windows Or Drown Themselves Or Take Pills; More Die By Accident; And Most Of Us, The Vast Majority, Are Slowly Devoured By Some Disease Or, If We're Very Fortunate, By Time Itself.

You Could Say I Don't Want For Me Be Seen Primarily As A Gay Writer. I've Never Hidden My Sexuality. It Matters That I'm Gay, It Matters That I'm White, It Matters That I'm Male, It Matters That I'm American. But Basically It's Just Less And Less Of A Big Deal.

Like The Morning You Walked Out Of That Old House, When You Were Eighteen And I Was, Well, I Had Just Turned Nineteen, Hadn't I? I Was A Nineteen-year-old And I Was In Love With Louis And I Was In Love With You, And I Thought I Had Never Seen Anything So Beautiful As The Sight Of You Walking Out A Glass Door In The Early Morning, Still Sleepy, In Your Underwear. Isn't It Strange?

At The Risk, Then, Of Being Shunned By Some Of My Gloomier Peers, I Venture To Tell You That Writers Work Like Demons, Suffer Greatly, And Are Also Happy, In Unmistakable Ways, Some Of The Time. If We Had No Knowledge Of Happiness, Our Novels Wouldn't Sufficiently Resemble Real Life. Some Of Us Are Even Made A Little Bit Happy, On Occasion, By The Writing Process Itself. I Mean, Really, If There Wasn't Some Sort Of Enjoyment To Be Derived, Would Any Of Us Keep Doing It?