Anyone who makes a life of what they love is a hero to me, and it's important for those people to be visible in every kind of life, every kind of love, every kind of work.

Being celibate was so wonderful. It taught me a lot about love, but even more about my own self outside of love. I'd never met myself out of love before, really.

The craft work becomes a mediator between me and my secrets, between me and the listener.

I made a conscious decision when I was writing that book to depict in real time how I treated it, and how I thought about it, and how I portrayed it to other people, because I wanted the story to be one of change from that to a more honest appraisal, a more accepting appraisal of myself and other people in that world.

Being a dominatrix, sticking my foot up people's asses for money, necessitated that I divorce myself from any sort of objective perspective on what I was doing. In order to think about things as a writer you have to objectify your experience. I couldn't have been enacting that experience if I was objectifying it.

S&M is just a set of practices that get classified as a single category, when more accurately they are a part of much larger set of behaviors: expressions of love, and self, and play, and even art. There is no hard line between "vanilla" sex and S&M sex, or any other kind of relation between people.

We often think that "bad" relationships are motivating by self-loathing or a wish for self-destruction, but I think that loving people who hurt us is more tied to a profound and earnest wish to soothe ourselves and recover from older hurts. And I've also found that having empathy for that urge is the best way to move through it, and beyond it.