“I started writing because I had a need inside of me to create something that was not there.”

My experience with people who tried to label me was that they usually did it to either dismiss me or use me.

There is no thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.

I remember how being young and Black and gay and lonely felt. A lot of it was fine, feeling I had the truth and the light and the key, but a lot of it was purely hell.

Without community, there is no liberation.

The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.

Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does.

Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.

Wherever the bird with no feet flew, she found trees with no limbs.

We are all more blind to what we have than to what we have not.

Oppressors always expect the oppressed to extend to them the understanding so lacking in themselves.

You are the one that you are looking for.

I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.

When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.

We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings.

Whenever the need for some pretense of communication arises, those who profit from our oppression call upon us to share our knowledge with them

the Law has made the man and wife one person, and that one person the husband!

Aging will create the music of the coming century.

You absorb so much from whatever your environment is, as an artist, and you learn to take from it what can help you create.

Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It’s about making life more fair for women everywhere. It’s not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It’s about baking a new pie.

I think the best way to invite people into the conversation is to just create something beautiful out of love, and people naturally gravitate towards a new way of looking at fashion.

Imagining anything is the first step toward creating it. Believing in a true self is what allows a true self to be born.

God made Blues right after he made woman.

It sounds strange for me to be saying this, but I’ve come around to the idea that sex really is for procreation.