So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

To be black and an intellectual in America is to live in a box. On the box is a label, not of my own choosing.

Rumor is rarely more interesting than fact, but it is always more readily available.

I think that black fiction authors have to work very hard to avoid being typed as seeking only a black audience.

In our sensible zeal to keep religion from dominating our politics, we have created a political and legal culture that presses the religiously faithful to be other than themselves, to act publicly, and sometimes privately as well, as though their faith does not matter to them.

In real life there are indeed black people who have been in the middle class for generations, but in entertainment it's as if they don't exist.

I think of my novels as entertainments.