You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it..

The main thing is to explain to yourself that everybody suffers..

Somehow we have to detach from feeling as though money is a quick and easy standard by which we can gauge how well we're doing..

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

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

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….

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..

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

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

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….

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 just like doing it, I like writing..

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

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

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….

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 ….

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

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!.

Little children are all writers..