I think outsiders sometimes produce the best fictional perspectives on reality because they're set apart from it, so they have a unique view from the border.

Everyday is a bank account, and time is our currency. No one is rich, no one is poor, we've got 24 hours each.

If you aren't following your bliss, there is a discrepancy in your psychology that needs to be healed, it needs to be mended.

If you're doing something, if you're following something that is directly at odds with who you are, you've got to slow down and ask yourself why you're following that dream.

I'm not a literary writer who is wedded to notions of realism and fiction. I believe that you can write anything if you can feel it convincingly.

Honestly, in retrospect, I would wish for future generations to have the ability to have a coming out process that was less alcohol-soaked than mine was.

I think we need to always mimic reality in our fiction. I think that we can stir things up and reveal a truth beneath the surface in that way as well.

This is not an international thriller so much as a fiercely literate attempt to subvert the thriller genre itself.

I think that I am profoundly influenced by writers who have explored loss, and longing, and fear. Those influences have turned me into a thriller writer, essentially.

I encourage young people to refrain from putting themselves in dangerous situations in the name of validating themselves sexually.

I am one of those people, and I may be personally biased, who wishes that I had some place to come out of the closet besides a bar.

I don't see why it matters what is written. Not when it's about people. It can always be crossed out.

I promised that from now on I would write only for the Lord.

What is economics? A science invented by the upper class in order to acquire the fruits of the labor of the underclass

Real change never occurs from the top on down, [but] always from the bottom on up.

Larry Summers, I think, he had a long history of arrogance and relative ignorance about poor people's culture and working people's culture and so forth.

I liked the more sophisticated urban style of blues like Ray Charles and B. B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Lou Rawls; people like that with more of a tendency toward jazz.

Even now / I am not old. / I never think of it, and yet / I am a grandmother to eleven grandchildren.

I want [Donald] Trump to send out a tweet saying that he's going to keep his campaign promises.

You have to give love to get love.

I can get better. I haven't reached my ceiling yet on how well I can shoot the basketball.