The law,” he continued, “is made by the rich people so that the poor people can’t get ahead…

I’ve always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.” – Associated Press interview, 12-7-11

We will be one step down from the Creator,” she said, her olive-hued face tightening into an expression that she considered dramatic. “Imagining a world and then making it.

I’m not afraid of my daughter-in-law, Mrs. Theon Pinkney. She’s the one who should be afraid. Four big men grabbing her and putting her in chains. What’s wrong with you?”The police stood there, slightly confused....

I understood about fear. And I knew better than anyone in that room what Mouse was capable of. But still I had been raised in a place where to show your fear was worse than...

There are as many kinds of love as there are flowers and bugs put together but men and women and their needs are all the same.

You know, one of the interesting things you find about writing fiction is that any fiction you write has to be political. Otherwise, it goes into the realm of fantasy. So like, if you write...

Kit [Carson Kitteridge] watched me for a few moments before saying, “That was some impressive killing you did. Naked too.””I hope I didn’t embarrass Office Palmer.””She said that after all she heard about you she...

A man’s bookcase will tell you everything you’ll ever need to know about him.

That would be like me tellin’ a gosling not to migrate down south his first mature season. You got to go. Got to. There’s gonna be snakes and foxes, and in your case, […], there...

These short stories are vast structures existing mostly in the subconscious of our cultural history. They will live with the reader long after the words have been translated into ideas and dreams. That’s because a...

The girl was cinnamon colored in the way of Native America after it had been raped by Europe.

Freedom is a state of mind, I said wondering where I’d heard it before, not a state of being. We are all slaves to gravity and morality and the vicissitudes of nature. Our genes govern...

I wondered if I could just drop the role I carried like a mantle of a dethroned prince.

Mrs. Turner gripped my baby finger.It’s amazing how a man can feel sex anywhere on his body.

I don’t give a fuck what you’re trying to do or what you want. I’d send your ass away if you were a white man with a red ribbon tied around your dick.

We are not trapped or locked up in these bones. No, no. We are free to change. And love changes us. And if we can love one another, we can break open the sky.

We born dyin’…But you ask a man an’ he talk like he gonna live forevah.

That’s how powerful you are, girl…You pretty, but pretty alone is not what people see. You the kinda pretty, the kinda beauty, that’s like a mirror. Men and women see themselves in you, only now...

If you want to be a writer, you have to write every day… You don’t go to a well once but daily. You don’t skip a child’s breakfast or forget to wake up in the...

The life most of us live are lives we are forced to live by immediate needs, influences, and pressures.

It was mid-November 2008. There were pirates taking ships with impunity in African waters, terrorists punching holes in Indian security, China sinking towards depression because Americans were afraid to buy cheap goods for Christmas, and...

The first thing you have to know about writing is that it is something you must do everyday. There are two reasons for this rule: Getting the work done and connecting with your unconscious mind.

That’s how Ptolemy imagined the disposition of his memories, his thoughts: they were still his, still in the range of his thinking, but they were, many and most of them, locked on the other side...

The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink.

Science fiction [is] the kind of writing that prepares us for the necessary mutations brought about in society from an ever changing technological world and as a result. The mainstream hasn’t excluded SF; the mainstream...

It’s not that racism doesn’t exist. Lots of people in New York, and elsewhere, hate because of color and gender, religion and national origin. It’s just that I rarely worry about those things because there’s...