It ain't that you get religion. Religion gets you and then milks you dry. Won't let you drink a little whiskey. Won't let you make no fat-assed girls grin and giggle. Won't let you do a damn thing except work for what you'll get in the hearafter. I live in the here and now.

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.

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.

If I could have found what I needed at thirteen, I would not have lost so much of my life chasing vindication or death. Give some child, some thirteen-year old, the hope of the remade life. Tell the truth. Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you there is magic in it.

Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is the way you can both hate and love something you are not sure you understand.

I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.

Mama learned to laugh with them, before they could laugh at her, and to do it so well no one could be sure what she really thought or felt.