I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else.

Race doesn't really exist for you because it has never been a barrier. Black folks don't have that choice.

The idea that sex is something a woman gives a man, and she loses something when she does that, which again for me is nonsense. I want us to raise girls differently where boys and girls start to see sexuality as something that they own, rather than something that a boy takes from a girl.

I am a bit of a fundamentalist when it comes to black women's hair. Hair is hair - yet also about larger questions: self-acceptance, insecurity and what the world tells you is beautiful. For many black women, the idea of wearing their hair naturally is unbearable.

I often make the mistake of thinking that something that is obvious to me is obvious to everyone else.

I can write with authority only about what I know well, which means that I end up using surface details of my own life in my fiction.

I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.