Writing about racism requires a directness that writing a love story does not.

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.

A glass is good and a lass is good. And a pipe to smoke in cold weather The world is good and the people are good And we're all good fellows together.

It was a compromise. There was a sense that I could write my own memoirs, and Larry [Grobel] would help me down the line, or maybe not, maybe he was too close to me.

Faith actually moves no mountains, but instead raises them up where there were none before.

Let us rejoice at the many unexplored fields in which there is unlimited fame and fortune to the successful explorer . . .

To be able to share in another's joy, that is the secret of happiness.

A rare bird upon the earth and very much like a black swan.

Whatever your path is, that's your path.

Salvation is God's way of making us real people.

Reincarnation is, indeed, the key which unlocks all doors, the universal "combination," before which our manacles fall from our limbs -- the life-line by which the crooked way is made straight.

My mom lived on an ashram on the early eighties. She turned me on to kundalini yoga and chanting and Transcendental Meditation. That was the first time I ever knew real peace.