To me, if the writing doesn't have rhythm, it feels dead. I lose all confidence. The music has to emerge to feel confident enough to move on to the next major chapter.

The feeling it gave me was an odd combination of weightless self-pity and excitement. I understood my life was meaningless, and this knowledge freed me up to accomplish absolutely anything.

I guess I don't really know what I want to do, either. Sometimes I feel like a shook-up bottle of soda. Like, I have all this passion that wants to explode, but I don't know where to aim it yet.

I was really drawn to spoken-word style poetry. I loved the rhythms, and for some reason, I was just drawn to this poetry as a way of expressing my feelings, because I didn't have any other outlet.

When I'm there, it's pure silence. There are other writers there, too, and I get super competitive. I have this weird fear that some guy next to me is writing this amazing novel, so I got to compete.

Being the first to go to college in my family was a great thing, but it was also a source of guilt. I felt like almost a sellout going to college.

I feel like I have a lot of novel ideas, but they often come up while I'm already in the process of working on a book. You have to watch out with the slutty new idea.

Growing up as a mixed-race kid myself, when you are in the middle of it and you're young...you don't think about it consciously. It's your reality.

But not just alive like I was yesterday and the day before. Alive like I knew I was alive. Like I could feel the breaths coming into my chest. And I knew I was the person inside my own body.

Sometimes when you're surrounded by dirt...you're a better witness for what's beautiful.

I stayed there on the floor like that for a long, long time.Eating and crying.Crying and eating.

Intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death.

I have been a soreheaded occupant of a file drawer labeled "science fiction" ... and I would like out, particularly since so many serious critics regularly mistake the drawer for a urinal.

I watched Picasso visit the Planet of the Apes, as the masters rot on walls and the angels eat the grapes.

Pride goes before destruction.

He has everything a boxer needs except speed, stamina, a punch, and ability to take punishment. In other words, he owns a pair of shorts.

You have opened up the prison gates of my womanhood. And all the passion that was unsatisfied in for me so many years, leaped into a wild reckless storm boundless as the sea.

I gave in to life. I was not defeated but outplayed.

You occupied my space. But because you were not in my present, when I looked into my future I saw . . . nothing. Isn't that sad? And stupid?

Discontent is a good thing: discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leave them better, leave them different.

Tolerance to my mind has been greatly overrated . . . . I take as much pleasure in detesting the good brothers and sisters of the [Anti-Saloon] League as they have in hating me.