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.

Teenagers are free verse walking around on two legs.

What's the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.

Why write stories? To join the conversation.

Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.

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.

I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way. Do not buy into their system of censorship, imagining that if you drop this character or hide that emotion, you can slide through their blockades. Do not eat your heart out in the hope of pleasing them.