Even if you don't feel like sitting down to write or working on that big proposal, or whatever it is, just show up anyhow and the rest will follow.

Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people.

I really, deeply believe in the primacy of character. I believe that my job as a writer is to put a believable human being on a page.

I couldn't imagine a book with many characters in it and one of them not being gay. It would have felt like a glaring and problematic omission for me. But I also wanted to write that character as a person, not just a gay person.

If there had never been the Great Migration there would never have been jazz, there would never have been Michelle Obama. A lot of amazing black people exist in this country because of the Great Migration. That's nation-building.

I try to find the beauty in things. On dark days, I sit in my armchair looking at clouds and I am awed at how rain is made.

There were class differences among black people then and there are class differences among black people now. There is still an assumption among many people in American society that being black is its own class, a blanket class. That, I believe, is an erroneous and deeply offensive view.