As a general rule, I tend to collaborate with artists whose work I admire.

I couldn't write about love without writing about hate - specifically, how the experience of hatred embeds itself in the body and prevents love from entering or leaving.

I have been and continue to be committed to art as a tool to ignite, comfort, and discomfort.

Now is not the time for Canadians to be sanctimonious. It is time for us to be prudent and active.

Children's books have great potential to reveal new possibilities to readers, because the intended audience is at an age of genuine learning.

In poetry, I didn't have to provide resolution. I could ask hard questions without feeling responsible for the answers.

As a person of color, I know race can't be stripped from admiration or preference.

I have dedicated a significant portion of my time and artistry to making art that addresses various forms of oppression, including white supremacy, misogyny, and biphobia.

I do use art as a site of protest, particularly in relation to dominant narratives.

I feel like I have had to catch up to the art I've made, and learn from the protagonists I have written, especially in relation to gender.

It's exciting to consider how art, in its ability to reveal, can be ahead of the artist.

The human species' foremost task and unshakable duty is survival.

Happiness is something you get as a by-product in the process of making something else.

Ask an older person you respect to tell you his or her greatest regret.

My father loved biographies. He loved the true tales of interesting people that were shaping our culture. I get why he dug Vanity Fair. You feel smarter, somehow, for reading it.

The press has no better friend than I am, no one who is more ready to acknowledge . . . its tremendous power for both good and evil.

People ask me, 'What do you do?' And I tell them I'm a writer, but always with the silent reservation, 'I am, of course, not really a writer. Hemingway was a writer.'

There is no road too long to the man who advances deliberately and without undue haste; there are no honors too distant to the man who prepares himself for them with patience.

The state is the servant of the citizen, and not his master.

If no ones doing the creative work that you want to do, do it yourself.

Things that are very significant and important to you when constructing an identity when you're younger change.