We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

The zipper opened all the way down our spines.

My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.

Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'

The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season.

When you stood between somebody you loved and death, it was hard to be awake and it was hard to sleep.

It was amazing how it worked: the tiniest bit of truth made credible the greatest lies.