Sometimes family members will ask to be kept out of certain things that I'm writing, and I try to respect that. I'd much rather have relatives than a book.

Create dangerously, for people who read dangerously. ... Writing, knowing in part that no matter how trivial your words may seem, someday, somewhere, someone may risk his or her life to read them.

Toni Cade Bambara said: “Writing is the way I participate in the struggle.”

I come from a place where breath, eyes, and memory are one, a place from which you carry your past like a hair on your head. Where women return to their children as butterflies or as tears in the eyes of the statues that their daughters pray to

I think novels just really show us the deepest parts of people's hearts, and you cannot walk away anymore and say, "I don't know."

I very much love a physical book myself. I think people who have had this experience of also seeing a book come together, from sitting down and writing the first word, to holding the binding in your hand, we have a deeper sentimental attachment to it than others might.

When you write ,it's like braiding your hair. Taking a handful of coarse unruly strands and attempting to bring then unity.