Finding people who get enormous pleasure from reading books is a more and more unusual experience, and so writers just so much want to be heard.

I got more and more politically active and just followed the course of feminism and sexual liberation

Photographs have always been the tar baby of censors and obscenity laws. Literature can certainly (if it's any good) conjure up the most pornographic imagination. But photographs dare to be real. No matter how contrived or constructed they are, there's that damn body staring you in the face.

I see the effects of sexual and gender liberation all around me, just like you do, but I don't have a sense of being in the majority.

When AIDS was at its most brutal, frightening, my-God-what-are-we-going-to-do era, that was when vampire stories and stories about blood and trust swept the literary world.

Everyone wants to be a dyke now; everyone craves our freedom, guts, and knowing looks.

I think that you have to do everything you can do to empower girls when they are young, from their education, to their successful independence, to their sexual self-knowledge.