Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.
People pay for that they do, and still more, for what they have allowed themselves to become. And the pay for it simply: by the lives they lead. – James Baldwin.
Write to your fear.
Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I’d rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.
Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.
I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way, in the way other people’s seemed real – the lives I had read about in books.
Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read – something most important what I should not try to write.
Once I was born, her hopes had turned and I had climbed up her life like a flower reaching for the sun.
Two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that if we are not beautiful to each other, we cannot know beauty in any form.
I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.
I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.
The only magic we have is what we make in ourselves, the muscles we build up on the inside, the sense of belief we create from nothing.
I am the only one who can tell the story of my life and say what it means.
Write the story that you were always afraid to tell. I swear to you that there is magic in it, and if you show yourself naked for me, I’ll be naked for you. It will be our covenant.
Women lose their lives not knowing they can do something different. Men eat themselves up believing they have to be the thing they have been made. Children go crazy. Really, even children go crazy, believing the shape of the life they must live is as small and mean and broken as they are told.
I have a terrible memory.
Life ain’t the movies.
The bottom line is I’m writing to save the dead. I’m writing to save the people I have lost, some of whose bodies are still walking around.
I claimed myself and remade my life.
Teenagers are free verse walking around on two legs.