It’s important to set challenges that you’re not sure you’re equal to.
It’s fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.
I can’t write what I don’t believe in.
I’m still very blunt: If you want to be a writer, get a day job. The fact that I have actually been able to make a living at it is astonishing.
I’ll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villain.
And while it is true that I got the best woman in the world, I don’t think love saves you.
Writing is the only way I know to demand justice from an uncaring universe.
Beauty is a hard thing. Beauty is a mean story. Beauty is slender girls who die young, fine-featured delicate creatures about whom men write poems. Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time. And I loved her for that.
I do not write about nice people. I am not nice people.
I need you to do more than survive. As writers, as revolutionaries, tell the truth, your truth in your own way.
If you just go get one of these little fine arts degrees or writing program degrees, it never forces you to confront your responsibility as narrator, whereas any of the social sciences make you at look the interaction between the storyteller and story.
What’s the best thing you can do for your writing? Construct a boring life.
People begin to write in order to create what they have not found and, a little bit, to give something back.
I put on the page a third look at what I’ve seen in life – the reinvented experience of a cross-eyed working-class lesbian, addicted to violence, language and hope, who has made the decision to live, is determined to live, on the page and on the street, for me and mine.
Babies change things, open doors you thought were shut, close others. Make you into something you never been.
I don’t believe that there is any true friendship without a bond of honor, and the honor in friendship is the respect you give the other that she also gives you.
I think I would have died if there hadn’t been the women’s movement. It gave me a vision that I could do something different, and it gave me an understanding that I wasn’t a monster, or sport, or a betrayer of my family.
Gravy is the simplest, tastiest, most memory-laden dish I know how to make: a little flour, salt and pepper, crispy bits of whatever meat anchored the meal, a couple of cups of water or milk and slow stirring to break up lumps.
Every kid I meet who’s a reader has got something like that, their fantasy world. And science fiction is the best, especially for girls because it’s the one place where you can do the forbidden.
If I could have found what I needed at thirteen, I would not have lost so much of my life chasing vindication or death. Give some child, some thirteen-year old, the hope of the remade life. Tell the truth. Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you there is magic in it.