I had diverged, digressed, wandered, and become wild. I didn't embrace the word as my new name because it defined negative aspects of my circumstances or life, but because even in my darkest days—those very days in which I was naming myself—I saw the power of the darkness. Saw that, in fact, I had strayed and that I was a stray and that from the wild places my straying had brought me, I knew things I couldn't have known before.

You get to define the terms of your life.

Because when an artist has to assert that her intended audience is all humans rather than those who happen to be of her particular gender or race, what she’s actually having to assert is the breadth and depth of her own humanity.

I taught workshops at universities. I wrote for magazines. This took time and insane amounts of juggling, but it's how I earned a living.

The most important thing for aspiring writers is for them to give themselves permission to be brave on the page, to write in the presence of fear, to go to those places that you think you can’t write - really that’s exactly what you need to write.

Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.

Of course some people manage to write books really young and publish really young. But for most writers, it takes several years because you have to apprentice yourself to the craft, and you also have to grow up. I think maturity is connected to one's ability to write well.