Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up to my own terror and pain and reexamining it, re-creating it in the story, and making it something different, making it meaningful - even if the meaning is only in the act of the telling.

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.

One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.

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

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

Behind the story I tell is the one I don't...Behind the story you hear is the one I wish I could make you hear.