You could mistake your ability to go this far for strength. So you go on. Strength is admirable, after all, and you are ashamed of everything else ab… - Alexander Chee

Ever since I’d been old enough to know about virtue in a woman, it had seemed like a bull’s-eye painted on my head in rouge.

There was a question I wanted answered more than I wanted anything else, and it could take my life to answer it. This question was What could I be? This was what I wanted to know.

You are up against what people will always call the ways of the world - and the ways of this country, which does not kill artists so much as it kills the rationale for art, in part by insisting that the artist must be a successful member of the middle class, if not a celebrity, to be a successful artist. And that to do otherwise is to fail art, the country and yourself. Should you decide that writing is your way to serve your country, or to defend it, you are almost always writing about the one it could become.