I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their system of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your heart out in the hope of pleasing them.

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

I tell my students you have an absolute right to write about people you know and love. You do. But the kicker is you have a responsibility to make the characters large enough that you will not have sinned against them.

I put on the page a third look at what I've seen in life - the reinvented experience of a cross-eyed working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language and hope, who has made the decision to live, is determined to live, on the page and on the street, for me and mine.

I don't believe that there is any true friendship without a bond of honor, and the honor in friendship is the respect you give the other that she also gives you.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.

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