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

My book has a pre - civil rights setting with a post - civil rights sensibility. I believe less and less that there is something called "The Black Experience," though undoubtedly there was one once.

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 think that people have some sort of vision that everybody is moving towards perfection, and that there is some sort of set steps or something like that that you can move through to get to that place, and that that's sort of the project of being alive.

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.

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.

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