Quote

I think ethnic and regional labels are insulting to writers and really put restrictions on them. People don't think your work is quite as universal.

When you're writing, you think: How does intimacy happen in the work? You don't know who your reader is, woman, man, child, black person, Asian, who knows?

We don't want to create a literary ghetto in which black writers are only allowed to write black characters and women writers are put on 'girl books.'

Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.

Of course, the way writers think about those things is almost certain to be affected by their own cultural background, and it would be hard to deny that, for whatever reasons, a lot of SF writers come from Anglo or European backgrounds.

Writing is not a matter of choice. Writers have to write. It is somehow in their temperament, in the blood, in tradition.

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

That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing.

If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.

Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.