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I read the script, and I knew it was a good part. It was written for a white actor. That's what I'm up against - I have to try to make roles happen for me that aren't written black.

I heard about the book and I said, 'Oh my god, I've got to read this book,' and I didn't know that a white woman wrote it. Nobody said that to me, they just said, 'The Help - Oh my god, you've got to read it.' Everyone failed to mention it was a white woman, I think, because nobody really wants to talk about race.

It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story.

It's the same old story. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller - writer, musician, filmmaker.

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

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.

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

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.'

Black people were very angry with me for writing the book. A lot of people didn't believe me, or didn't want to believe me, and that used to really bother me. It was a very painful and difficult time.