Quote

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.

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.'

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

Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.

My writing has been largely concerned with the depicting of Negro life in America.

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.'

There haven't been enough profound things written about what being black means and what a black character is. Nobody knows.

Censorship is a strange situation. There was times when people would burn books because they didn't like what people were doing.

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