At some point I just acknowledged, at least to myself, that I had a great deal of respect for people of faith. Faith is a strange and wonderful thing. You come up to a kind of wall of unknowing and instead of turning back in despair you leap over it into something else. The Church isn't why I'm a writer, but it's probably a part of it.

There is a forgotten black middle class in America - a group which is huge but underrepresented in the media and in art. It's difficult to talk about these things, because it forces one to talk in generalities, but that's my view. I do think the idea of a blanket class for black people is unfortunately still present.

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.

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

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.

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

Voice isn't fixed or unmalleable, it adapts to the characters you are creating and the story being told. I suppose in some way that's true in life - a little flexibility goes a long way.