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It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as 'other.'

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

We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

White writers in many cases choose not to populate their fiction with people of color. A lot of what I'm doing is trying to write against that, not about race but against the avoidance of race that's such a dominant model in white literary discourse.

I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting.

Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be.

Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.

I love writing about black women, but if you go beyond that, we're human beings - and because we're human beings, it's universal for everybody.

I hate white people writing for black people; it's so offensive. So we go out and look specifically for African-American voices.