It's hard to say which of us is luckier, the ones who go through long periods when they can't write or the ones who can write pretty easily.

It's a scary thing for fiction writers, when you're always writing from the point of view both as and for someone who is different.

In many cultures, women are sometimes literally kept from learning to read or from going to school.

We have to give our poor, innocent, and undeserving-of-our-badness characters trouble in order to make them characters in a story.

It's hard to say which of us is luckier, the ones who go through long periods when they can't write or the ones who can write pretty easily.

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

I think that inevitably, the trouble our characters go through is a kind of metaphor for what's happening in ourselves.