If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.

I like using White Out. But sometimes backspace or delete works just as well, when I don’t have Windex to clean my computer screen.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say.

I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

What are you going to do? "Can't say - run for president, write -" "Greenwich Village?" "Good heavens, no - I said write - not drink.

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

When you're writing what you love, it's the most fun you can have with your clothing still on, unless of course, you write naked.

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.

What word or expression do you most overuse? Re-reading a collection of my stuff, I was rather startled to find that it was 'perhaps.

There are a thousand things to hear about, informationally, daily, but the thing that doesn't go away is the one to pay attention to.

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.

As many authors have said, if the writer is not surprised by events, then chances are that the reader will not be either, and grow bored.

There are certain books in the history of the world that should never have been written. This book makes all those look like masterpieces.

I want to write an unreliable narrator. In fact, he’ll be so unreliable that I’m not even sure he’ll show up to narrate.

A sentence should be read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.