Quotes from Alexander Chee

I grew up treating a life as a writer as a career in letters, one devoted to many kinds of writing. And so it seemed normal to study both fiction writing and the literary essay as an undergrad.

The idea of a talent that was bigger than an artist's ability to choose to use it, that would dictate the artist's life more than the artist could dictate, was interesting to me.

The qualities that make parties such a nightmare for people - and also so pleasurable - make them incredibly important inside of fiction. There's a chaos agent quality to them: You just don't know who's going to be there or why. You could run into an old enemy, an old friend, an old friend who's become an enemy.

It took me a while to get back to 'The Queen of the Night.' I was angry with it as an idea because I felt like it had sort of ruined my life by taking so much attention away from 'Edinburgh.' So it essentially languished in a drawer until 2004, when I pulled it out, dusted it off, and thought, 'Oh, I actually really like this idea.'

One of the things that's really important in 'Queen of the Night' is how people communicate with their clothes.

In 2009, the 'New York Times' ran an analysis on the cost of being a LGBT couple trying to live as a married couple but without the same protections. Over a lifetime, they estimated a couple would spend as much as $467,562 more, and as little as $41,196, with costs running lower the higher your income.

My mother's family has been in Maine for over 300 years on the same farm. They have a King George III deed.

I've known the poet Eileen Myles since the 1990s, when I first moved to New York, and I remember seeing her walking her Pit Bull Rosie around the East Village. She had these beautiful arms and David Cassidy hair and the sort of swagger so many of the gay boys I knew wished we had. We all had crushes on her.

I said that I like to write on trains and that I wished Amtrak had residencies for writers.

My literary heroes were mostly women writers and thinkers - Joy Williams, Joan Didion, Anne Sexton, June Jordan, Sarah Schulman, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Christa Wolf - and much of this writing was political as well as literary.

As of 2013, according to the World Health Organization, 35 million people were estimated to be living with HIV or AIDS globally, and 39 million have died from the disease. The epidemic of denial won, and now everyone knows there is money in the making of drugs for AIDS.

I loved being a soprano. It was one of my very favorite things in life, and thus far, and losing that voice was a profound emotional moment for me in my life. I never became that interested in my adult male singing voice.

When I'm identified as a fiction writer at parties, the question comes pretty quickly. 'Did you go to school for it?' someone asks. 'Yes,' I say. 'Where?' they ask, because I don't usually offer it. 'I went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop,' I say.

I have lived for a long time inside a series of coincidences that most people would find implausible in a novel.

The day in 2011 that I went to the office of the city clerk in lower Manhattan with my partner Dustin to register for our domestic partnership was coincidentally also the first day same-sex partners were allowed to register for marriage in the state of New York.

The best relatively contemporary portrayal of a courtesan that I've ever seen was probably in 'Children of Paradise,' a film that was made during the Nazi occupation of France, made in secret actually.

ACT UP was trying to explain to Americans that AIDS could affect all of us: that health care that ended once your disease was expensive could affect more than gay men with HIV or AIDS. We were trying to tell them about the future - a future they didn't yet see and would be forced to accept if they failed to act.

It is expensive to live in hotels, even cheap ones - more expensive than renting.

As a young writer, I questioned the idea that I had to write fiction in a world where I could write my own ethnicity only and nothing else. 'Fach' to me was a little like that. As a biracial person, that's an inherently unstable identity.

At first, teaching was more or less a straightforward way of making a living and having access to institutional resources while writing - aka libraries. And that was not inconsiderable. But it didn't in any way touch the writing. Maybe it would push the writing aside sometimes, but mostly it was fine.

Fate and history have a similar feeling. They are weird mirrors to each other.

Marie Cornelie Falcon, who lost her voice while performing - singing the line 'Je suis pret' - 'I am ready.' How much more tragic can you get?

By the 1880s, English translations of both the French and the Russian editions were available, and Americans began to read 'War and Peace.'

The Narrator of 'A Sport and a Pastime' is an American photographer living in a borrowed house in what he calls 'the real France,' Autun, a small town where he hopes to take some career-changing photographs in the spirit of Atget.