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.

I did things I did not understand for reasons I could not begin to explain just to be in motion, to be trying to do something, change something in a world I wanted desperately to make over but could not imagine for myself.

The only magic we have is what we make in ourselves, the muscles we build up on the inside, the sense of belief we create from nothing.

When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.

It's important to set challenges that you're not sure you're equal to.

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.

And while it is true that I got the best woman in the world, I don't think love saves you.