I'll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villain.

I'm still very blunt: If you want to be a writer, get a day job. The fact that I have actually been able to make a living at it is astonishing.

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.

I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way.

People begin to write in order to create what they have not found and, a little bit, to give something back.

Behind my carefully buttoned collar is my nakedness, the struggle to find clean clothes, food, meaning, and money. Behind sex is rage, behind anger is love, behind this moment is silence, years of silence.

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.