I've been writing all my life. Even though I didn't have sort of careerist aspirations as a writer, it was very much my identity.

All of us, writers and non-writers alike, have incredible well-springs of personal experience and history. And we also have imagination - which I think is a kind of human miracle.

The critics and the reviewers are more frightening than anything else!

The ways in which theological constructs pose questions about what it is to be a human being on this earth are deeply elegant and deeply interesting to me. I may not always agree with the answers religion offers, but I take great interest in the questions it poses.

There's a stereotype that to be a strong black woman is to be strong about being black.

The correlations between real life experience and the storylines in novels are never as direct or simple as they might seem.

Half of what's wrong with people today is that they ain't got no place to go that makes them peaceful.