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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.'

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.

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 believe that the American audience is not so dumb that they wouldn't be interested in a black story.

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.'

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.

I believe black characters in fiction are still revolutionary, given our long history of erasure.

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

I would say that in my black readership, more of my readers tolerate the horror aspect of my work, you know. 'I don't usually read this kind of stuff, but.'