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

Love it, love it and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet. More than lungs that have yet to draw free air. More than your life-holding womb and your life-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize.

I don't think a female running a house is a problem, a broken family. It's perceived as one because of the notion that a head is a man.

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.

My father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen - not vagrants - hanging from trees as a child was traumatic for him.

I don't wait to be struck by lightning and I don't need certain slants of light in order to be able to write.

Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself