Writing is the only way I know to demand justice from an uncaring universe.

For years and years, I convinced myself that I was unbreakable, an animal with an animal strength or something not human at all. Me, I told people, I take damage like a wall, a brick wall that never falls down, never feels anything, never flinches or remembers. I am one woman but I carry in my body all the stories I have ever been told, women I have known, women who have taken damage until they tell themselves they can feel no pain at all.

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.

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.

It has seemed to me that literature, as I meant it, was embattled, that it was increasingly difficult to find writing doing what I thought literature should do - which was simply to push people into changing their ideas about the world, and to go further, to encourage us in the work of changing the world, to making it more just and more truly human.

It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.

Life ain't the movies.