For a long time, I let my mother say what she wanted about me, and what was worse, for a long time I believed her.

You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You quote Neruda. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. Because you know in your lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.

Mine (story) ain't the scariest, the clearest, the most painful, or the most beautiful. It just happens to be the one that's got it's fingers around my throat.

If you really want a prize, or if you really want applause, you should try to write as many books as humanly possible.

It's just a matter of willpower. The day you decide it's over, it's over. You never get over it.

I was surrounded by a lot of male writers of color who have this incredibly bizarre relationship to masculinity. It's like we were all mega-nerds but you would never know that if you listened to the way they talk about themselves.

Love is the great test of the human. The human is tested by our ability to withstand love. Love is so difficult, it is so challenging, it demands of us that we wreck it with ourselves. It demands of us an honesty that few of us could sustain.