When I was growing up, I wanted passionately to be a physicist.

If you're a white male growing up in this society, you're constantly receiving encouragement to go on in science in the form of all the images that you're receiving.

When I was in seventh grade, I was bored out of my mind. We seemed to be learning the same things over and over in science and math, and two of the boys in my class were allowed to move ahead into these advanced classes, but I wasn't allowed because I was a girl.

The world is a complex place.

It's not that a literature for children of color doesn't exist; it's that so much of the extant literature is lacking in the essential quality that makes literature for children so extraordinary a form: imagination.

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness.

Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people.

I've always had this passion to be creative, and wanted to sing or be in bands and make music, but I didn't have ideas as to what format it'd be, or how I'd do it. I'm not very good with plans. I didn't think it would be me at the front, either. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that was something I'd prevent.