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.

When an editor first explained to me the difference between direct and indirect writing, I just thought it was a stylistic choice.

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

Whoever would write books? It's suffering as well as greatly satisfying. And certainly there's suffering in the sense that you don't know for a long time how to do it.

There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too.

I remember I had had one woman who had three or four kids, and some of them were having problems. I said, 'Maybe you could go write somewhere else, away from your house.' And sure enough, all kinds of wonderful stuff emerged. She was keeping too much charge of herself because she couldn't stop being a mother when she was in the house. You have to find your own way of letting loose, if you're one of those people.

I began to see, again and again, stories that were first confusing and second where the emotional impact was muted because the big scene came before the explanation of what was going on. There was a reverse chronological order as well as a concealment of what exactly was going on. I think often that comes out of the fear of being boring, and sometimes I think it's just an attempt to seem clever.