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

The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal.

my life has been saved over and over again by picking up a book in which someone captured the whole experience of being despised and not dying.

Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different..." from Two or Three Things i Know For Sure

I think I would have died if there hadn't been the women's movement. It gave me a vision that I could do something different, and it gave me an understanding that I wasn't a monster, or sport, or a betrayer of my family.

Piece by piece, my mother is being stolen from me.

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