Fiction writing is an act of imagination, lived experience is secondary in many ways, writing a novel really is all about inventing worlds and people..

I think that if you just write your characters you end up with something that people can access..

Even if you don't feel like sitting down to write or working on that big proposal, or whatever it is, just show up anyhow and the rest will follow..

Half of what's wrong with people today is that they ain't got no place to go that makes them peaceful..

At some point I just acknowledged, at least to myself, that I had a great deal of respect for people of faith. Faith is a strange and wonderful thing….

The correlations between real life experience and the storylines in novels are never as direct or simple as they might seem..

The ways in which theological constructs pose questions about what it is to be a human being on this earth are deeply elegant and deeply interesting ….

There is a forgotten black middle class in America - a group which is huge but underrepresented in the media and in art. It's difficult to talk about….

The critics and the reviewers are more frightening than anything else!.

I like to say I had a very varied undergraduate education. I was an English major first, and then at the end of my college career I decided I was int….

I'm wary of being put in boxes. But at the same time, it's important that I embrace my identity as a writer who happens to be gay, and in my own way ….

I couldn't imagine a book with many characters in it and one of them not being gay. It would have felt like a glaring and problematic omission for me….

I think being consistent is really important. In the arts there's a misconception that you sit around waiting for the muse to come, and that it's all….

One of the things that writers worry about is finding a voice. I don't think it's a thing that you find so much as it is something that comes to you,….

I really, deeply believe in the primacy of character. I believe that my job as a writer is to put a believable human being on a page..