Quote

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.

If people say something rude or off-color, you have to take it with a grain of salt, because they don't know you.

My black-and-white work is more of a celebration, and the color work became more of a critique of society.

As a little girl in the '50s, I couldn't wear a purple-and-white flowered skirt with a red blouse - those colors were too loud. My parents were not into that 'We are Negros that wear all beige,' but there was a line you could walk over that could signal vulgar, crass, rather than clever use of color. And that outfit crossed over the line.

I think speculative fiction has fewer unspoken prerequisites than literary fiction for writers of color.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

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.

Outside books, we avoid colorful characters.