I'm always interested in encountering people who are synesthetic and seeing how they experience things.

The act of language or the act of denying language carries its own heaviness.

Giving the reader the space to move around and be active, and encourage their active response is important to me. That will connect the reader more to the text.

There's relief in white space for the reader.

Synesthesia has interested me for a long time, both as a literary device and as a puncturing of the membranes that organize how the world comes into someone's head.

I have what I came to find in my research is a mild form of synesthesia, though I never would have labeled it as such. It's how I think about numbers and letters. They all have inherent genders.

For me, the genders are an essential element of numbers and letters, not something that could be removed from them.

If a synesthetic person says the letter a is green, it can't ever be anything but green.

I find myself writing protagonists who do feel pretty cut off from others but who want to make connections and aren't very good at it.

Even in so-called realist or conventional writing there can be defamiliarization.

I don't know whose sensibility I'm responding to. Until someone starts pushing against what they've inherited and starts making their own decisions about language, it's difficult.

Our passion is our strength.

It is all very well for so-called sensible people to recommend flat heels and short skirts, but most of us prefer not to be sensible.

And just as you can find hip-hop lyrics beating up on all these groups, including young Black men themselves, the primary producers of the music, you can also find lyrics celebrating them.

Call me anything you like, but don't call me a lady.

The code of Hammurabi in ancient Babylon prescribed this punishment for a doctor convicted of inept surgery: amputation of the hands.

Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.

Halliburton is not a 'company' doing business in Iraq. It is a war profiteer, bilking millions from the pockets of average Americans. In past wars they would have been arrested – or worse.

When you give without reservation, you’ll become a magnet that pulls the world toward you.

Libraries were full of ideas-perhaps the most dangerous and powerful of all weapons.