It’s fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.

It’s important to set challenges that you’re not sure you’re equal to.

The bottom line is I’m writing to save the dead. I’m writing to save the people I have lost, some of whose bodies are still walking around.

What are you so angry about?” my mother had asked me the last time I had gone home to visit.Why aren’t you more angry, I had wanted to ask her. But I couldn’t talk to...

I was born in 1949, and by the time I was 10, I figured out that my hope chest was not aimed in the same direction everybody else’s was. And that life was going to...

Watch out, or I’m liable to put you in a story.

Every kid I meet who’s a reader has got something like that, their fantasy world. And science fiction is the best, especially for girls because it’s the one place where you can do the forbidden.

Beauty, my first girlfriend said to me, is that inner quality often associated with great amounts of leisure time.

Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.

Writing is the only way I know to demand justice from an uncaring universe.

If somebody gave you several thousand dollars and nothin’ to do but write, would you be a writer then? Would you tell your stories, your family’s stories, then?

I wanted to start over completely, to begin again as new people with nothing of the past left over. I wanted to run away from who we had been seen to be, who we had...

Teenagers are free verse walking around on two legs.

My sisters, we didn’t like each other as kids. We were scared of each other, I think, but we’ve grown to love each other. It was fun to write about these sisters who were supposed...

Things come apart so easily when they have been held together with lies.

My assumption when I began writing was that you were never going to make any money. And you were never going to reach everyone. Therefore you had to do as much as you could in...

When I finally let someone into my narrow bed, the first thing I told her was what I could not do. I said, “I can’t fix it, girl. I can’t fix anything. If you don’t...

My son, Wolf, was born when I was past 40 and the author of a best-selling novel. That means he has grown up a middle-class child – one who sometimes asks me for stories of...

When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels. My sister became unmarried and pregnant during high school, and she kept saying, ‘This wasn’t supposed to happen! Why...

Write to your fear.

The hardest thing to teach young writers is that it’s wonderful to tell your truth. And that’s what you should do. But it damn well better be beautiful.

My family of friends has kept me alive through lovers who have left, enterprises that have failed, and all too many stories that never got finished. That family has been part of remaking the world...

Gravy is the simplest, tastiest, most memory-laden dish I know how to make: a little flour, salt and pepper, crispy bits of whatever meat anchored the meal, a couple of cups of water or milk...

I’ll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villain.

Why write stories? To join the conversation.

Where story comes from, I don’t know. I know that I become obsessed with something. An idea, an image, a person, the way a person talks. And then something starts happening that I can’t explain,...

I want hard stories, I demand them from myself. Hard stories are worth the difficulty. It seems to me the only way I have forgiven anything, understood anything, is through that process of opening up...

I think I would have died if there hadn’t been the women’s movement. It gave me a vision that I could do something different, and it gave me an understanding that I wasn’t a monster,...

If you write a book that’s as powerful and successful as ‘Bastard,’ there’s a strong desire to prove there’s something else.

I did not begin with craft, I began with strong feelings and worked toward craft.

Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.

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 think it’s wonderful that people in pickup trucks are buying two flats of dog food and a copy of ‘Bastard.’ I want my view of the world to be right up there next to...

And while it is true that I got the best woman in the world, I don’t think love saves you.

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...

Piece by piece, my mother is being stolen from me.

Women.Lord God, I used to follow these girls. THey would come at me, those girls who were not really girls anymore. Grown up, wounded, hurt and terrible. Pained and desperate. Mean and angry. Hungry and...

Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.

I can’t write what I don’t believe in.

I did not imagine anyone reading my rambling, ranting stories. I was writing for myself, trying to shape my life outside my terrors and helplessness, to make it visible and real in a tangible way,...

If you just go get one of these little fine arts degrees or writing program degrees, it never forces you to confront your responsibility as narrator, whereas any of the social sciences make you at...

Two or three things I know for sure, and one is that I’d rather go naked than wear the coat the world has made for me.

I’m still very blunt: If you want to be a writer, get a day job. The fact that I have actually been able to make a living at it is astonishing.

I have a terrible memory.

It ain’t that you get religion. Religion gets you and then milks you dry. Won’t let you drink a little whiskey. Won’t let you make no fat-assed girls grin and giggle. Won’t let you do...

Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.

I tell my students you have an absolute right to write about people you know and love. You do. But the kicker is you have a responsibility to make the characters large enough that you...

One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.

Don’t go taking that gospel stuff seriously. It’s nice to clean you out now and then, but it ain’t for real. It’s like bad whiskey. Run through you fast and leave you with pain.