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 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.

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

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.

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.

My best friend is dead, and I could have saved her. It’s so wrong so completely and painfully wrong, that I walked through my front door tonight smiling.

I write books to relieve ­myself of pain. That's the prime motivator to write. Period.

Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.

No matter how important a man at sea may consider himself, unless he is fundamentally worthy the sea will some day find him out.

Nae man can tether time nor tide.

An artist is an entertainer, number one - a storyteller who takes people someplace, who gives them what they didn't know they wanted.

This villainous heterogenous mass of ocean highwaymen are the very ejectment of the four quarters of the globe.

If education does not create a need for the best in life, then we are stuck in an undemocratic, rigid caste society.

Art is order, made out of the chaos of life.

In my 20s I was going round seeing agents who were patronising because I was fat and a girl, which was a double whammy. I knew what it was to feel out-of-the-loop.