My father was both the person who gave me reason to learn how to fight and the one who taught me the basics of fighting. He would tell me that if it was a big fight, it would probably be uneven, it wouldn't be fair

Language is political. That's why you and me, my Brother and Sister, that's why we supposed to choke our natural self into the weird, lying, barbarous, unreal, white speech and writing habits that the schools lay down like holy law.

If you are free, you are not predictable and you are not controllable.

My father was very intense, passionate and over-the-top. He was my hero and my tyrant.

The music of language became extremely important to me, and obvious to me. By the time I was seven I was writing myself. I was a poet

To tell the truth is to become beautiful, to begin to love yourself, value yourself. And that's political, in its most profound way.

If any of us hopes to survive, she must meet the extremity of the American female condition with immediate and political response. The thoroughly destructive and indefensible subjugation of the majority of Americans cannot continue except at the peril of the entire body politic.