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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.

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

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.

I find so much writing colourless, small in its means, unwilling to take stylistic risks. Often it goes wrong; I am not the one to judge. Sometimes, I hope, it goes right.

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.'

Writing is a communication.

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

I think what we need, especially in publishing, is more commissioning editors and editors who are people of colour.

Writers are the ones who figure out how to put their observations into words.