If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And white people have a very, very serious problem.

Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers.

It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.

Maybe [I care about language] because I'm an editor, maybe because I'm picky, but it's all we got, don't shrink it. Don't dumb it out, make it little.

I really want some meaning. It used to be easy to toss it off. Now it's harder and harder. You have to navigate just to find something that has nourishment. It's the absence of nourishment. What do you do in place of nourishment? It's usually junk. Either it's junk food or junk clothes or junk ideas.

I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to.

The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, the concept of patriarchy as the way to run the world or do things.