"Fashion is also an opportunity to get a message out about how you feel about the world."

"What people SHOULD preface their rule-dispensing [for creative pursuits] with is something like this: 'Hey, this is the way it worked for me.  Maybe it'll work for you too?  And if not, no worries.  We're still pals.'"

"It's better not to know so much about what things mean or how they might be interpreted [in art] or you'll be too afraid to let things keep happening. Psychology destroys the mystery, this kind of magic quality. It can be reduced to certain neuroses or certain things, and since it is now named and defined, it's lost its mystery and the potential for a vast, infinite experience."

"My views are a natural part of my writing.  I am who I am.  That shapes how I see the world and how I narrate it.  I don't know that there's any separating one's views from one's writing.  Journalists often talk about impartiality and treat it as a holy grail—but I don't know that anyone is impartial."

"I hope that whoever reads my work, no matter the subject matter, will be able to tell that this poet is so clearly in love with the animals and plants and mysteries of this planet and tried to do her very best to get you to feel the same way too." (camera owner)

"In memoir, you have to be particularly careful not to alienate the reader by making the material seem too lived-in.  It musn't have too much of the smell of yourself, otherwise the reader will be unable to make it her own."

"Find Art.

Seize brush.  Take stance.  Do fancy footwork.  Dance.

Run race.  Try poem.  Write play."

"To preach that story is conflict, always to ask 'where's the conflict in your story?'—this needs some thinking about.  If you say that story is about conflict, you're limiting your view of the world severely.  And, in a sense, making a political statement: that life is conflict, so in stories conflict is all that really matters.  This is simply untrue.  To see life as a battle is a narrow, Social-Darwinist view, and a very masculine one.  Conflict, of course, is part of life, I'm not saying you should try to keep it out of your stories, just that it's not their only lifeblood.  Stories are about a lot of different things."

"I want people to like the work, not me."

"I know, if you're a writer, you're constantly asked to take positions.  So don't do it without doing your homework."

"I took a stance [with my art] about a couple of things. I thought I'd earned the right; that I knew enough about Life at this point, and had gone through enough where I thought stating an opinion about a thing or two would not be soapboxy or preachy but was just hard-won experience trying to communicate to other people."

"I don't think that we can minimize the value of what happens when we normalize, through entertainment, other cultures and orientations."

"The most powerful weapon in writing is love."

"When an audience is so massive, do people even know why I write or what it means?'

"I believe that it is difficult to kill an idea because ideas are invisible and contagious, and they move fast."

"It makes me uncomfortable to talk about meanings and things. It's better not to know so much about what things mean. Because the meaning, it's a very personal thing, and the meaning for me is different than the meaning for somebody else."

"As I get older, and I get a view on the lyric a bit more, it becomes more meaningful to me."

"The things you're not supposed to talk about in films are the same things you're not supposed to talk about at dinner parties: religion, politics and sex."

"I believe that in the battle between guns and ideas, ideas will, eventually, win."

"I don't care about quotation marks and directing the reader and making things easy for the reader.  I don't want my fiction to be an example of the MFA style of 'show, don't tell,' of giving the reader a window onto reality, of lending a sense of transparency to the prose.  Stylistically, I wanted something dense, image-heavy, and digressive, because I like those things."

"A metaphor is a one-sentence fantasy.  It assigns lifelike or magical qualities to ordinary objects.  Metaphor and fantasy are bedfellows—and many fantasies are intended as metaphors; George Orwell's Animal Farm is the best example of this."

"I think you can tell as a reader when a character starts making a statement and you can suddenly hear the author talking."

"[My films] mean different things to different people. Some mean more or less the same things to a large number of people. It's okay. Just as long as there's not one message, spoon-fed. That's what films by committee end up being, and it's a real bummer to me ... Life is very, very complicated, and so films should be allowed to be, too."

"I believe I have the right to think and say the wrong things. I believe your remedy for that should be to argue with me or to ignore me, and that I should have the same remedy for the wrong things that I believe you think."

"Technique without imagination is worthless, and imagination without technique will cloud our work's intended meaning."

"I decided that I wanted to have a record for my sons that would say, 'Wow, Mom really marveled at the world.  She really championed the good on Earth.'  That's how Lucky Fish partially came to be.  And I've never really written for a specific audience in mind until that particular book."

"As a playwright, your primary responsibility is to not bore your audience. It's not to improve them. This is already an arrogant art form."

"People listen to music and interpret it in their own way, but it's weird when a thing that has helped you through a hard time becomes your career."

"Later on I find out what [a lyric] was really about. Lots of times I'll think it's about one thing and as I get a little distance from it—and by distance I mean like, say, seven or eight years—it suddenly becomes very obvious to me it was about something else entirely. It happens especially onstage. Periodically I do something older and I suddenly realize 'God—listen to what this is about. I can't believe that I said this in public.'"

"Writers often revisit the same themes throughout their careers, examining them from various points of view."

It's Always an Apt Time for Revolution

New York Biotopes: Symbiotic Coexistence

"You also need the conviction to say something and not bookend it with some sort of apology or qualification."

The Great Discontent

"The very denial of politics was a political statement.  And I knew this, as I continued to write."

"Cliché as the idea of the 'writer's responsibility' might sound, I felt it in my bones.  I had always felt it, despite having tried to keep it at bay for so many years."

"My family begged me to remain apolitical when writing about Cuba.  I understood where they were coming from, but I wasn't sure it was possible.  Wasn't writing itself a political act?"

"I was used to uniting an audience with humour; this time, I wanted to unite an audience with humanity."

"What we feel strongly about is that thing we want to stand on our rooftop and shout to the world, that thing we would die for, that thing we are uniquely qualified to express.  What we feel strongly about is not the plot, but rather the underlying meaning that drives the plot.  What is that thing?  Be curious.  Because that is what your story is about. "

What is success in the 21st century? It's novels that invent their own unique form, spring from a personal place, enact a passionate intent, and prove it by reaching a broad readership. It's both great reviews and great sales. It's moving hearts and changing minds. It's winning accolades and winning the devotion of readers. It's finding a way through your fiction to convey what you alone see, yet we all come to accept as the truth.

"I want the books to speak for themselves. You can read? All right, tell me what my books mean. Astonish me."

"I don't write things to benefit the world.  If it happens that they do, swell."

"To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being... what matters is not whether you love it or hate it, but only to be quite clear about your position regarding it."

"Liberty is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear."

"A work of art is a confession."

"Do not just read the poets who sound like you and share your particular demographic or political beliefs, but read dangerously and adventurously."

"I should like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart."

"Your story is an argument—a thesis positing a thematic notion, an idea, a conceit. The ending is where you (purposefully or inadvertently) prove or disprove that thesis."

"Pure advocacy has an agenda that can derail writing because the world is often more complicated than advocacy allows."

"Advocacy has an agenda in a way that art doesn't.  But I do think they can co-exist."

"Writing is merely a conveyance for story—without story, without a message, writing is just a hollow bucket.  You need something to communicate, and story is that thing."

"The question is always how to be good, I think, first.  And then the politics of the person and the world they create influence the views of the readers, if they are lucky."

"As if we go to the page as lobotomized creatures who abandon all other issues in their lives to be writers.  No, I think all writing has some advocacy in it.  All the time."

"Advocacy is a challenge because it is—not because it might pervert writing, any more than love or sex or hope might pervert writing."

"The audience should never know that—or, rather, should never feel that you're talking to them. They want to feel like they're witnessing something, that they're looking in a forbidden window. The audience doesn't want to feel told. Or lectured to."

"Most authors are [saying something big with their books]. Not all of them. But most. And I'd encourage you to be one of the ones who is."

"We know in our deep and private places that we have a responsibility to take on things that draw our attention and to turn them into these mysterious objects—poems and stories—that illuminate, that offer an objection to the status quo, that warn and empower."

We Are Made of Words

"Messages are for Western Union." (on social commentary in films)