There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.

Making a decision to write was a lot like deciding to jump into a frozen lake.

What I try to do is write. I may write for two weeks ‘the cat sat on the mat, that is that, not a rat,’.... And it might be just the most boring and awful stuff. But I try. When I’m writing, I write. And then it’s as if the muse is convinced that I’m serious and says, ‘Okay. Okay. I’ll come.

I speak to the Black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition--about what we can endure, dream, fail at and survive.

I love the song 'I Hope You Dance' by Lee Ann Womack. I was going to write that song, but someone beat me to it.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine ... before she realizes she's reading.

I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money.' Yes, I think everybody should be paid handsomely; I insist on it, and I pay people who work for me, or with me, handsomely.

I also wear a hat or a very tightly pulled head tie when I write. I suppose I hope by doing that I will keep my brains from seeping out of my scalp and running in great gray blobs down my neck, into my ears, and over my face.

I write because I am a Black woman, listening attentively to her people.