I wanted to hear my own whispers in the next room and know that I was thinking of me.

I never take pictures. Skies are much larger in reminiscences and my friends are much better-looking. Photos crop reality into little squares; instead, I have very good binoculars.

I'd say it's never a challenge to present white and heteronormative privilege. The hard thing is to write any other way.

There are terrible things that never get easier, and there are things even more terrible that get easier with time and repetition.

My social status in the last year has gone from zero to hero.

In the rural South, the only interesting people were the sexual deviants. Everybody else was able to be part of the mainstream, and could find a way somehow.

The interesting artists I know are the ones doing political work. The most interesting people I know are the people who care about politics.

I'm enough of an anarchist aesthetically, when it comes to art - I want people to be reading my stuff voluntarily. They should be doing it because they want to.

People wanted to get me published, and my early work was so weird that they weren't getting anywhere. I thought, okay, I'll do something that's just a tad more normal.

I really like writing in English, and it's the best job I've ever had.

Lee explained to her that art for art’s sake is an upper-class aesthetic. To create art divorced from any purpose, you can’t be living a life driven by need and desire.

I can't change you and you can't change me, but together we can work to change the world.

Politics are about power; we cannot evade that truth or its consequences. We dream of a better world but it is in Utopia - that is, nowhere.

Everyone who gives up a serious childhood dream - of becoming an artist, a doctor, an engineer, an athlete - lives the rest of their life with a sense of loss, with nagging what ifs.

It makes a great difference whether Davus or a hero speaks.

When you fall, leap to your feet and try again.

I was totally absorbed. I was in another world, or another dimension; all sense of time evaporated.

Art appreciation, like love, cannot be done by proxy.

There are a lot of people out there who lie about their age and I think it does us all a disservice. It can't all be over when you hit 30. That would be rubbish.

Someday it'll all be done by machine. Information machines.

If you pay peanuts, you wind up hiring monkeys.