Everybody’s got rights. A man tied to a bed got rights. A man down in a dungeon got rights. A little screaming baby got rights. Yeah, you got rights. What you don’t got is power.

Sometimes I would be very upset because my memories are very murky from my childhood, but there are certain emotional memories or emotional truths that are painful, and things that I know to be the case and I had to nail them down, and that was difficult.

We hit and we kept on hitting; we were allowed to be what we were, frightened and vengeful — little animals, clawing at what we needed.

Shame doesn't exist in the animal kingdom. It's a human conception.

I don't think that any family has a function. I just think that a family is. It just exists.

I totally bristle against words like "dysfunction" or "abuse."

As you become an adult, shame gets introduced and reintroduced constantly to you. So where something that, to a child, just is what it is - you know, your father's violent but he loves you and that's just the way it is - later on you realize that this is like different, shameful, blah blah blah.