Zitat des Tages von Dorothy Allison:
Watch out, or I'm liable to put you in a story.
If you write a book that's as powerful and successful as 'Bastard,' there's a strong desire to prove there's something else.
Change, when it comes, cracks everything open.
I'll tell you the secret. When you begin with a character, you want to begin by creating a villain.
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, and it has a lot to do with language.
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 will not have sinned against them.
Class, race, sexuality, gender and all other categories by which we categorize and dismiss each other need to be excavated from the inside.
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.
It's important to set challenges that you're not sure you're equal to.
One of the strengths I derive from my class background is that I am accustomed to contempt.
I can't write what I don't believe in.
It's fun to tease people about where fiction and life intersect.
Fiction is a piece of truth that turns lies to meaning.
I think I would have died if there hadn't been the women's movement.
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 my childhood but knows nothing of what it means to grow up poor and afraid. I have worked to make sure of that.
When I was growing up, I always read horror books, while my sister read romance novels.
Writing is the only way I know to demand justice from an uncaring universe.
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 gallon boxes of Tide.
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.
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 the service of something you genuinely believed in. And if you do that and people get upset, well, there you go.
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 be very, very complicated. And that I could either be provocative and declamatory, or shy, retiring and scared.
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.
Teenagers are free verse walking around on two legs.