He never said "Don't tell your mama." He never had to say it. I did not know how to tell anyone what I felt, what scared me and shamed me... (109)

Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.

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

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

Babies change things, open doors you thought were shut, close others. Make you into something you never been.

...I have come to make distinctions between what I call the academy and literature, the moral equivalents of church and God. The academy may lie, but literature tries to tell the truth.

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.