In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you're a great writer, you must say that you are.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
As a writer, I've always been somebody who's been productive and hustled hard.
I am struck by how, walking down the street, I'm rarely made aware of my race, but that among journalists, race is absolutely massive.
A writer is what I am.
Everything around a writer, or musician in the record business, probably everything in all the United States or in all of western civilization, is about competition.
At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good.
I'm an immigrant writer, or an African writer, or an Ethiopian-American writer, and occasionally an American writer according to the whims and needs of my interpreters.
We are all in a race for dear life: that is to say, we are fugitives from death.
Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps.
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.'
Where writers are from is one of the world' s most boring topics. Where we're born, gender or race, wealth or poverty - those are the things we spend time talking about. Stop trying to label me. I'm a writer. Worry about whether I'm any good!