If you’re a poet, you will experience an intense personal engagement or sense of vocation, but from the perspective of poetry out in the world, you’re just a medium for generating more poetry out in the world.

I want to take a machete and go after the dominant culture, but I also see the little joys in it. The little joys in living.

I’m trying to figure out how we can bring lies into creative nonfiction—and how it can still be the truth. So I’m experimenting with that in terms of form and content.

Pain or terror persists in the night, but joy comes in the morning. You have to go through a gauntlet to get to joy. It’s not easily gotten or reached—or sustained.

"I’ve always said that I’m constantly trying to trick myself into the mindset of when I first started making comics as a teenager."

If people don’t turn to art and they don’t turn to religion, we’re left with consumerism.

When you write a memoir, you have an unwritten pact with the reader that you have to be expose even the unattractive aspect of your narrative. I mean really embarrassing things that make you squirm and might make the reader squirm.

My mom believed that the way to get through life was to be as beholden as possible to white people. If she was in a room and a white person walked in, her whole body would get smaller. She tried really hard to teach me how to live like that—because it was the way to stay alive. If you said the wrong thing to the wrong person you might wind up in a shallow grave somewhere.