Yes, there's a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it, we must do better.

You can't write a script in your mind and then force yourself to follow it. You have to let yourself be.

I was stained by failure.

I didn't know I was even supposed to HAVE issues until I came to America

The only reason race matters is because of racism.

There were people thrice her size on the Trenton platform and she looked admiringly at one of them, a woman in a very short skirt. She thought nothing of slender legs shown off in miniskirts--it was safe and easy, after all, to display legs of which the world approved--but the fat woman's act was about the quiet conviction that one shared only with oneself, a sense of rightness that others failed to see.

The novels I love, the ones I remember, the ones I re-read, have an empathetic human quality, or 'emotional truth'. This quality is difficult to fully define, but I always recognise it when I see it: it is different from honesty and more resilient than fact, something that exists not in the kind of fiction that explains but in the kind that shows.