“Something about the turbulence of adolescence makes you want to do something creative...I thought as I got older I would stop writing about it, but I find adolescence, and popular depictions of it, very interesting. I like to see where my own life intersects or diverges from notions of what a teenager is supposed to be, or what a black person is supposed to be, or a woman.”

“Before I published any of my own stories, I read a great many stories by people as passionate about writing as I was, and I learned something from everyone I read -- something most important what I should not try to write.”

“Being your slave, what should I do but tendUpon the hours and times of your desire?I have no precious time at all to spend,Nor services to do till you require.Nor dare I question with my jealous thoughtWhere you may be or your affairs suppose,But like a sad slave stay and think of noughtSave where you are, how happy you make those.”

“I've tried to explain to people that I don't 'love' writing any more than I 'love' breathing. It's something I do and it's something I need. If I thought about it as a love/hate thing, I probably would have quit long ago. And then died.”

“Everything I know, everything I put in my fiction, will hurt someone somewhere as surely as it will comfort and enlighten someone else. What then is my responsibility? What am I to restrain? What am I to fear and alter--my own nakedness or the grief of the reader? I want my stories to be so good they are unforgettable; to make my ideas live and my own terrors real for people I will never meet. It is a completely amoral writer's lust. If we begin to agree that some ideas are too dangerous, too bad to invite inside our heads, then we stop the storyteller completely. We silence everyone who would tell us something that might be painful in our vulnerable moments.”

“You know I hate, detest, and can't bear a lie, not because I am straighter than the rest of us, but simply because it appals me. There is a taint of death, a flavour of mortality in lies -which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world -what I want to forget. It makes me miserable and sick, like biting something rotten would do. Temperament, I suppose.”

“I see, I tell him, looking from him to Rachel and again to him.Then I turn to look for what it is we're supposed to be seeing.”