I wanted to start over completely, to begin again as new people with nothing of the past left over. I wanted to run away from who we had been seen to be, who we had been... It's the first thing I think of when trouble comes - the geographic solution. Change your name, leave town, disappear, make yourself over. What hides behind that impulse is the conviction that the life you have lived, the person you are, is valueless, better off abandoned, that running away is easier than trying to change things, that change itself is not possible.

... survival is the least of my desires.

I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way.

Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.

I told her, Don't touch me that way. Don't come at me with that sour-cream smile. Come at me as if I were worth your life - the life we make together. Take me like a turtle whose shell must be cracked, whose heart is ice, who needs your heat. Love me like a warrior, sweat up to your earlobes and all your hope between your teeth. Love me so I know I am at least as important as anything you have ever wanted.

I'll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villain.

People begin to write in order to create what they have not found and, a little bit, to give something back.