I don't think a white person can write accurately and convincingly about what black people experience of oppression.

I'm very secretive. I'll write a whole novel and revise it, which might take me two years or more, and the people I know best don't know what I'm writing about.

Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.

We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.

You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.

Sometimes indirect style and varying chronology is great, but quite often I've seen it be just something that gets in the way. It turns out when I talk to the writer that she or he, and more often it's a woman, that she's worried.

I think the difference between writing as someone and writing for them is that when you write for someone, you take on a kind of political burden or message, which I don't think we have the right to do.