My using heroin didn’t have any kind of literary significance for me at the time. I never thought, “I’ll try heroin and then write about it”. I mean, at one point I really thought I wasn’t going to survive. I took notes, absurd things that happened I jotted them down, but I never thought “One day this will be a novel”. I mean I had more pressing concerns. Like where I was going to get my next fix from. Algren’s book was written in the voice of a narrator. Mine was written in a way to take the reader into the bathroom stall, so to speak. And how do you write about love if you have never experienced it?
Sam Jordison interviews Tony O’Neill.
You see, left alone, a gay person is hardly gay at all, but put two such people together and they are four times as gay as they were separately. Four gay people are sixteen times as gay as two and so on. And where my friend does that leave me? Are you going to suck my cock while I am having this conversation with myself?
It’s not clear to me whether there’s enough reformist momentum for Muslim cultures generally to look outside of Islam and evolve, or whether conservative elements will prevail and compound the problem by insisting religion plays an even greater role in cultural and intellectual life.
I’ve got a friend whose son is doing maths and physics at university, and he was depressed the other day. I asked him why, and he said it was because of subatomic particles, which I agreed can be kind of depressing. I told him, half joking, that the answer to that was to read Nietzsche, and his mother looked at me very seriously and said, ‘So which one should he start with?’.
Writing in English as a resident of countries where English is not the dominant language, you ostensibly absent yourself from a larger dialogue taking place – which can be both good and bad. For me, it has been mostly good because I do not think I would have ever developed into anything much of a writer had I remained in the United States. This whole experience of the last six years has given me a chance to effectively “be alone” with my language, which probably conditions how my writing comes out. In the same way that Gertrude Stein probably wouldn’t have become the writer she became had she remained in America her entire life, you could probably say the same for me. 
To be honest, whatever my feelings about the human rights situation in Brazil, I don’t necessarily think I’m a person qualified to write about it. What excited me about the AfroReggae story, therefore, was that it gave voice to people who don’t often get heard. Frankly, who cares what an Englishman feels about Brazilian human rights? It’s much more interesting and powerful to hear from those who are actually living in the midst of the problems.
The idea of being creatively productive on the much-loathed tube suggests a remarkable determination, but Ashon insists, “It’s a good place to work. I wrote most of the second book on the tube, just because there are no distractions. You can’t even get up and make a cup of tea; you’re literally just shoved there and you want to get off as quick as you can, so you work really quickly.”
The whole thing was going to burn up in its own energy with no ash while trying to reach some indefinable, and anyone could see it coming. Here is what I learned about art. The artist never really goes over the cliff. The artist goes to the edge of the cliff and has a good long look into the abyss. When the abyss looks back into him, he scampers back from the edge. I don’t care if it is Bukowski we’re talking about; the artist never goes all the way. The writer doesn’t really live the experiences he or she writes about. She cannot send a message back from over the cliff or have enough distance from the subject matter to write clearly during freefall. If you want to write, you just can’t do it when you are dead…
When I first started being published I felt like I was producing these stories in a literary vacuum. I stayed in a lot with the curtains drawn. This was back before the Internet of course when you had to communicate via public telephones, or else write words down on pieces of paper. Steven Hall hadn’t been invented. Paul Ewen was wearing short trousers in New Zealand. Tony O’Neill was in borstal. Heidi James was a brothel keeper’s daughter. Everybody was alone and fairly frightened. Dark days indeed. Well, the context is very different now.
At 57 Genesis wiggles in his jean mini skirt, tights opaque enough to see a dazzling selection of tattoos spiralling around his legs, each of us unsure as to who goes through a doorway first. His face is Barbie perfect, almost plasticized with applied American makeup, overstuffed lips pouting a cherry salmon colour, his eyelashes bat flirtatiously when deciding which book on army camouflage to buy; it is hard to remember that he is either man or woman.
