39 Quotes by Alaya Dawn Johnson

But in this room, the real conflict threads through our spoken words, in the way Gil stiffens when Enki touches his ear, in the way Enki glances at me as if he wishes I could do something to help.

To love light, you have to love dark. I’m not trying to be profound, I know you’ll understand. I don’t mean that you have to hate to love, or that you have to die to live. I mean that sometimes, you turn out the lights just to turn them back on.

There are people with an explicit political bent complaining about people having political agendas while nominating stories with political agendas. Is it political to try to be diverse? Is it political to try to imagine a non-heteronormative society? Yes, because it involves politics. But how do they expect us to not write about our lives?

In the publishing sense, 'urban fantasy' does not mean 'black,' and that's pretty ironic, considering that it's a euphemism everywhere else. It would be great to get that back.

I've come to think of Dunnett as the literary equivalent of the Velvet Underground; Not many people bought the books, but everyone who did wrote a novel.

The old fiction room at my high school was a small box of wonders, and no matter how long I spent investigating its seven and a half overstuffed shelves, I never stopped discovering treasures.

The trajectory of a lot of black lives in the 20th century was people moving into cities. A lot of the issue with modern urban fantasy is that it's un-diverse, and that's crazy with what we know the history of cities here to be.

Very early on in the process of trying to sell 'The Summer Prince,' I was told, 'Slavery seems to be very important to this society - is that on purpose?' Well, duh.

I was thinking about vampires and, specifically, about what makes vampires a romantic trope: about what people like about not just vampires but supernaturally long-lived creatures in general, which is a thing that shows up in probably fifty to sixty percent of paranormal romances... And then, for some reason, I decided to reverse it.