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

Beauty is a hard thing. Beauty is a mean story. Beauty is slender girls who die young, fine-featured delicate creatures about whom men write poems. Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time. And I loved her for that.

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

I do not write about nice people. I am not nice people.

Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world

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.

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