I'm not like a champion of profanity. I write what I hear, and the characters that I write, that's how they talk. That's how I talk a lot of the time. So I'm not trying to advance a social cause.
When I was a kid and I'd be in trouble. I'd ask God to help me, and then once the fire was out, I wouldn't talk to Him anymore. When I got older, I began to find I needed some help spiritually, just to function.
I think anything that anyone writes that's any good is going to have a lot of autobiography.
The good thing is that life is sometimes a work in progress.
One way to make a positive out of a negative is that you can put it into your work.
I've lived with women, loved women, lost women. They've loved me, lost me, whatever.
I was raised a Catholic, so I can even feel a little, you know, embarrassed or guilty if I'm really offending people's sensibilities. To a degree.
I've lived my entire life in New York, and it informs everything.
September 11 reinforced for me that whatever I'm writing about, it better be something that really matters to me because we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. And for me it's stories about people in pain in New York.
