“After I came to New York in 1978, I experienced about three years of chaotic, impoverished, youthful excitement and desperate creative improvisation, followed by a decade of nonstop death of people around me from AIDS, while scrambling for survival the whole time by writing journalism. New York was never the same after the epidemic. In fact, it’s been a horribly depressing, punitive city to live in ever since, thanks to the disappearance of so many vital people, and thanks to real estate developers and Wall Street. But people who keep dredging up what a great place New York was thirty or forty years ago should just shut up and open a funeral home, where nobody minds if you talk about dead people all day.”

—Gary Indiana