Teaching is very important to me, and it has become more important as I get older..

We have to diversify, we have to find work we can do that helps other people while helping ourselves, work that has to do with writing that isn't nec….

I love it when people can help me with my work, so I do show it..

I just like doing it, I like writing..

There are so many different ways, most of them helpful and legal, to get yourself into a state of mind where writing is possible. It's going to be di….

Little children are all writers..

Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate..

When I've taught writing to five, six, and seven year olds, it's not very different than talking to an adult writer. They're writers then, and when t….

I get to a certain point, and I think in a novel it's about the third draft, when I want other eyes on it..

Whoever would write books? It's suffering as well as greatly satisfying. And certainly there's suffering in the sense that you don't know for a long ….

I heard a white writer say, 'Oh, I'd never put black people in my writing, I'm afraid I would offend someone by doing it wrong.' I can't bear that!.

There is a lot of censorship about writing that's exerted from all directions, from families or governments and society, even the fear of being offen….

I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts..

We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think..

I think you have to remember that writing is hard; my first editor used to say that to me..

In many cultures, women are sometimes literally kept from learning to read or from going to school..

There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too..

You may be somebody who writes best for a small press that doesn't pay very well, but you might have a fascinating and intricate style that might not….

I find that I get very excited about what my students are up to and that I get to be the hurdle they need to jump over..

I'm very secretive. I'll write a whole novel and revise it, which might take me two years or more, and the people I know best don't know what I'm wri….

Every once in a while someone says, 'You can't really learn anything, if you're really a writer then you wouldn't need to do it.' But I think what pe….