Even though novels were the love of my life, I started off writing poetry. I think because I had a knack for image and lyricism, even though I didn't really have anything to write about, or I didn't know what to write about. I could just couple words together that pleased me and so poetry seemed sort of natural.

The frustration of being marginalized often gets misdirected at the most visible members of one's own community, because they are more accessible than the real agents of marginalization.

Me writing the book and the subsequent interactions that we had were actually the cap on that experience. We were still in this weird purgatory about it when I published the book. When I gave them the galleys and what ensued after that, then I understood a lot more about our relationships and what the experience meant to them. I'd never wanted to know what they thought about it at all.

You can turn off the song the way you cannot the actual experience.

I never think about anything in my brain. I think in very small repetitive circles inside my own brain. That's why I'm a writer. It's the only way I get any sort of conclusion or understanding about anything.

It has been my experience that the people I judge most harshly are the ones in whom I recognize some part of myself.

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.