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

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

Maybe we're stuck with who we are.

I had never written about what it's like to live the life of a writer, and I had never read a book that combined talking about the life of writing and how you can do it, how you can stand it, how you can emotionally manage it, with the choices that we all make on the page.

If you have a character stand up and put on her shoes and open the door, in order to do that, you're imagining her shoes and her clothes and her house and her door. The character becomes more real. But once you've done that, you can probably just get it all across with a couple of details.

I heard a white writer say, 'Oh, I'd never put black people in my writing, I'm afraid I would offend someone by doing it wrong.' I can't bear that!

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