I wanted to honor the memory of this gay man who was silenced in so many different ways — by his chronic stutter, by his outré sexuality, by the labor camp, and finally by his brother Vladimir Nabokov, who failed to mention Sergey's existence until the third version of Speak, Memory.

I was so hoping that we could get beyond the whole gay writer thing now, which I feel stuck in.

You have to sink in order to write a book. I don’t mean in a depressive sort of way. You have to diffuse as much as anything else. Just in those early days -- to lose control of it and to be helpless and not know what you are doing. And then the focus comes sentence by sentence.

All along I said I wanted a community-focused bookstore, and that has really come to fruition so much sooner than I’d expected. I think the bonds with the community are going to just get stronger the longer we’re here.

There are guys who are offshoots of the Tea Party who go around with an American flag and say, “Kiss this or I am going to punch you in the head.” And they punch people in the head who don’t do it. They are usually a little drunk at the time, but it is something that you can run unto.

"There’s a very offensive Islamophobia that happens in the media. But then there’s also this overly-PC, liberal reaction to tiptoe around a lot of subjects which I think is its own form of insult."

I love the first person, in writing, in music, and in life. All great modern novels, as far as I am concerned, are in the first person.

I wanted to write about the young me as I would write about a character in a novel. And look at all that person's flaws and hold them up to the light. Because I think that’s what we get out of good fiction, too. Good fiction teaches you how to live.

I do have the same sense about my real life that I have about my fiction, which is that I make all these decisions but I have no idea why I’m doing what I’m doing. That life is essentially shaped by the unconscious in the same way that fiction is.

I always have faith in this idea that if I remain honest and open about my own confusion, the blurriness of my impressions – it's not because I'm short-witted or stupid – the chances are those feelings will be shared by other people.

If the narrative isn’t unfolding the way you want it, you can’t just change the details to make it better, the way you would when writing fiction. You have to represent the truth.

Henderson’s novel recalls all the sweat and fury of coming of age for anyone who dove into a mosh pit, or just fell for somebody who did.

"The parts of Solzhenitsyn that are funny aren’t there because he artificially introduced them. They're there because he’s trying to authentically replicate what life was like. And I’m trying to do the same."

The Millions: So once you have that knowledge, that the dream is a dream, what’s the point? Jesse Ball: At that point, you can fly around….

"If I do know some of men’s innermost secrets, it’s only because I share them. Men can be curmudgeons, horndogs, misanthropes, selfish, rebellious, crafty, mischievous, and so forth and still be loved – boys will be boys, their foibles and faults can be charming and funny -- but girls are another story entirely."

At times I feel a bit like some skeezy drug dealer, hanging out at the edge of the playground, going, “If I can get them to try it just this once, I’ll have them hooked!”