‘Every day’ is a bank account, and time is our currency. No one is rich, no one is poor, we’ve got 24 hours each.
Make a beautiful mess and clean it up later.
It never occurred to me to write anything that didn’t include gay characters in it.
Look at any city through the right memories and it could become a graveyard as haunted as a former battlefield.
This is not an international thriller so much as a fiercely literate attempt to subvert the thriller genre itself.
The good thing about New Orleans is that, overall, it’s an accepting place. It’s accepting of eccentricity, it’s accepting of excess, it’s accepting of color, in the sense of culture, not necessarily in the sense of race.
I think we need to always mimic reality in our fiction. I think that we can stir things up and reveal a truth beneath the surface in that way as well.
Usually when I put my focus on the pacing, the plot, the specific characterizations, – it’s ironic – but then I actually increase my chances of writing something that moves people because I haven’t become too self-conscious of the goal.
I had seen the gay social chronicle done abundantly and done very well. And I didn’t want to do any more of that myself, I wanted us to be included in the popular mainstream of entertainment fiction.
I’m not a literary writer who is wedded to notions of realism and fiction. I believe that you can write anything if you can feel it convincingly.
I think outsiders sometimes produce the best fictional perspectives on reality because they’re set apart from it, so they have a unique view from the border.
I am comfortable calling myself a writer of suspense, or a writer of thrillers; both terms are sort of interchangeable to me. I think that came from a sense of being at conflict with my true nature throughout my youth, and being afraid of discovery, and feeling as if I didn’t belong.
I think that I am profoundly influenced by writers who have explored loss, and longing, and fear. Those influences have turned me into a thriller writer, essentially.
Honestly, in retrospect, I would wish for future generations to have the ability to have a coming out process that was less alcohol-soaked than mine was.
My experience of coming out was very much centered around the bar scene. And what happened for me is that when I turned 18 and was old enough to get into certain gay bars in the French Quarter, I became a regular customer.
I do believe in the Kinsey scale, I think many of us fall in different places on the scale and I think it’s for each one of us to decide where we are on the scale, it’s not for someone else to decide for us.
I made the decision that, to be happy and to be content, I needed to live the life of an exclusive homosexual. I don’t mean an elitist homosexual, but I mean someone who is exclusively pursuing partners of the same gender.
Ultimately, I felt fortunate, because in many ways I did identify with aspects of being gay that were very stereotypical. I was a big theatre kid in high school, I was creative, I was very emotionally sensitive, even hypersensitive. I loved female divas.
I think what has been the ultimate challenge for me is being willing to be honest with myself about what works for me in terms of relationships and sexual relations. In that sense, I was pretty traditional and pretty buttoned down.
I encourage young people to refrain from putting themselves in dangerous situations in the name of validating themselves sexually.