I had a really happy childhood - my siblings were great, my mother was very fanciful, and I loved to read. But there was always financial strife.

I really don't want somebody writing something positive about me if they don't believe in it. I'd rather somebody write something real mean. I like reading bad stuff, it gets me excited. In fact, the only reviews I keep are the bad ones 'cause I think they're the cool ones.

I wasn't taking drugs or drinking. I was working and working and working. But I wasn't writing anything.

I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth

Yet you could feel a vibration in the air, a sense of hastening. It had started with the moon, inaccessible poem that it was. Now men had walked upon it, rubber treads on a pearl of the gods. Perhaps it was an awareness of time passing, the last summer of the decade. Sometimes I just wanted to raise my hands and stop. But stop what? Maybe just growing up.

Lets just say that I think any person who aspires, presumes, or feels the calling to be an artist has a built-in sense of duty.

I was so involved in my boy-rhythms that I never came to grips with the fact that I was a girl. I was twelve years old when my mother took me inside and said, "You can't be outside wrestling without a T-shirt on." It was a trauma.