I learned English by watching soaps as a kid, and since I don't have any formal education and can't teach at the universities like other literary writers do.

I have much more power and protection than Salman Rushdie, because I'm an American citizen, but yes, I live in terrible fear for my life and for the lives of my children. My whole family has been threatened, my adoptive parents had to sell their house and move out of Washington, D.C. because of death threats caused by my work and activism.

I love cooking for men and making love with them'not just reproductive lovemaking but I like sex for the sake of freaking out with men.

I feel as if I'm going through a mid-life crisis. I don't feel very attractive and it's like I'm frigid or something. I'm aging and it makes me very sad.

The press doesn't like me, because I am a weirdo to them, so they do everything to create their own fictional Kola Boof.

My autobiography is one of the truest, most frankly written books ever published in the western hemisphere.

I loved 1930's women's pictures'films by Josef Von Sternberg or William Wyler. So, I fashioned a style out of that. The integrity and ethos of what I would write, however, came from the films of Ousmane Sembene and from reading Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath and Alice Walker.