I wanted to write a new fable and see how many rules you could break.

I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.

I wanted to invent myself as a fictional character. And I did, and it has caused a great deal of confusion.

Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten what it is that hurts or where, until you move? There is a second of consciousness that is clean again. A second that is you, without memory or experience, the animal warm and waking into a brand new world. There is the sun dissolving the dark, and light as clear as music, filling the room where you sleep and the other rooms behind your eyes.

To me, life, for all its privations, is a luminous thing. You have to risk it.

Confidence and superiority: It's the usual fundamentalist stuff: I've got the truth, and you haven't.