I can't write what I don't believe in.

I was born in 1949, and by the time I was 10, I figured out that my hope chest was not aimed in the same direction everybody else's was. And that life was going to be very, very complicated. And that I could either be provocative and declamatory, or shy, retiring and scared.

Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.

I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.

What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.

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.

stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world.