Black Writer Quotes & Sayings

He leaned over, catching her lowered gaze. "I'm the present, Darlin'. — Lindsay McKenna

Now, there is a tendency at a point like this to look over one's shoulder at the cover artist and start going on at length about leather, tightboots and naked blades.
Words like 'full', 'round' and even 'pert' creep into the narrative, until the writer has to go and have a cold shower and a lie down.
Which is all rather silly, because any woman setting out to make a living by the sword isn't about to go around looking like something off the cover of the more advanced kind of lingerie catalogue for the specialized buyer.
Oh well, all right. The point that must be made is that although Herrena the Henna-Haired Harridan would look quite stunning after a good bath, a heavy-duty manicure, and the pick of the leather racks in Woo Hun Ling's Oriental Exotica and Martial Aids on Heroes Street, she was currently quite sensibly dressed in light chain mail, soft boots, and a short sword.
All right, maybe the boots were leather. But not black. — Terry Pratchett

I maintain that any writer of a book is fully authorised in attaching any meaning he likes to a word or phrase he intends to use. If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book, "Let it be understood that by the word 'black' I shall always mean 'white,' and by the word 'white' I shall always mean 'black,'" I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I think it. — Lewis Carroll

How do you paint a writer's block?
Just fill it with fifty shades of black. — Ana Claudia Antunes

All my life and all my experience, the events that have befallen me, the people I have known, all my memories, dreams, fantasies, everything I have ever read, all of that has been chucked onto the compost heap, where over time it has rotted down to a dark, rich, organic mulch. The process of cellular breakdown makes it unrecognizable. Other people call it the imagination. I think of it as a compost heap. Every so often I take an idea, plant it in the compost, and wait. It feeds on the black stuff that used to be a life, takes its energy for its own. It germinates,. Takes root. Produces shoots. And so on and so forth, until one fine day I have a story, or a novel ... Readers are fools. They believe all writing is autobiographical. And so it is, but not in the way they think. The writer's life needs time to rot away before it can be used to nourish a work of fiction. It must be allowed to decay. — Diane Setterfield

As a poet and writer, I deeply love and I deeply hate words. I love the infinite evidence and change and requirements and possibilities of language; every human use of words that is joyful, or honest or new, because experience is new ... But as a Black poet and writer, I hate words that cancel my name and my history and the freedom of my future: I hate the words that condemn and refuse the language of my people in America. — June Jordan

Despite popular conviction, a writer needn't wear black, be unshaven, sickly and parade around New York's East Village spewing aphorisms and scaring children. — Noah Lukeman

God's answer to your guilty conscience is the death of his Son. Your answer to a guilty conscience is usually something you do, like confessing harder, praying more, reading your Bible, paying more than your tithe in the offering and so on. These actions are what the writer to the Hebrews calls "dead works," the very things your conscience needs to be cleansed from and the very things that eventually get you wrapped up in the black shadow of your own guilt. — John White

Richard Price got a million dollar advance on one fake film book based on a paragraph outline and is able to seduce gullible White reviewers who know less about ghetto life than he. The New York Times has devoted more space to Price's tourist, ghetto writing than to any Black writer in history. — Ishmael Reed

The Black writer explains pain to those who inflict it. — Alice Childress

I certainly wasn't seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me, asking questions. One was, "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books. — Alex Haley

When I began to do a little public speaking, one of the questions I heard most often was, "What good is science fiction to Black people?" I was usually asked this by a Black person ...
What good is science fiction's thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and technology, or social organization and political direction? At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what "everyone" is saying, doing, thinking
whoever "everyone" happens to be this year.
And what good is all this to Black people? — Octavia E. Butler

There's an inherent idea that if a Black executive producer and a Black director are going to do a movie based on a Black writer's book that everybody is going to be Black. — Gabrielle Union

There is no trickier subject for a writer from the South than that of affection between a black person and a white one in the unequal world of segregation. For the dishonesty upon which a society is founded makes every emotion suspect, makes it impossible to know whether what flowed between two people was honest feeling or pity or pragmatism.(Howell Raines's Pulitzer Prize winning article "Grady's Gift")-Sockett admired this quote and used it in her summary ... — Kathryn Stockett

During the writer's strike I was walking a line and ran into Jack Black and he said, 'We're doing Airborne 2!', and I asked, 'Are you kidding?', and he said, 'Yeah.' I like 'Airborne,' its very pure. — Seth Green

Black is beautiful .Black isn't power. Knowledge is power. You can be black as a crow or white as snow but if you don't know and you ain't got no dough, you can't go and that's for sho'. — Lewis H. Michaux

Love was the greatest thing, wasn't it? Love was what we had that no one else had or could ever have? And you were a genius and I was your whole life. I was your partner and your little black flower. Slop. Love is just another dirty lie. Love is ergoapiol pills to make me come around because you were afraid to have a baby. Love is quinine and quinine and quinine until I'm deaf with it. Love is that aborting horror you took me to. Love is my insides all messed up. It's half catheters and half whirling douches. I know about love. Love always hangs up behind the bathroom door. It smells like lysol. To hell with love. Love is you making me happy and then going off to sleep with your mouth open while I lie awake all night afraid to say my prayers even because I know I have no right to say anymore. Love is all the dirty little tricks you taught me that you probably got out of some book. All right. I'm through with you and I'm through with love. Your kind of picknose love. You writer. — Ernest Hemingway,

No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much" ... No woman has ever written enough. — Bell Hooks

I have always been a singer, a writer, and a musician, not as a prodigy or as in a trade handed to me by my parents, but because of an inner voice or maybe a command from beyond reality as it is usually defined. — Frank Black

Suggested Reading Louis Bayard, The Black Tower; Sarah Blake, Grange House; F. G. Cottam, The House of Lost Souls; Michael Cox, The Glass of Time; Mark Frost, The List of Seven; John Harwood, The Ghost Writer; Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale. — Susan Hill

But when I do book signings and personal appearances, the audiences are mostly white. Growing up here, I expected that and understand it. Black audiences won't come out for a white writer for the most part. It really is just a fact of life. — George Pelecanos

Who am I? I'm the one you love to love and love to hate. I make you laugh, cry & cringe. You'll forever remember me or easily forget me. I'm past, present & future in black and white. I'm unique but always compared. You want me to take you away from your life if only for a little while. My pen knows no morals or boundaries. I'm a writer! — Eveli Acosta

... your writer of intensities must have very black ink, and a very big pen, with a very blunt nib. — Edgar Allan Poe

As a very young writer - kindergarten through about fifth grade - I most often wrote about black characters. My very early stories were science fiction and fantasy, with kids stowing away on spaceships and a girl named Tilly who was trying to get into the 'Guinness Book of World Records.' — Tananarive Due

It's the same old story. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller - writer, musician, filmmaker. — James McBride

BLOOM: As far as I'm concerned, computers have as much to do with literature as space travel, perhaps much less. I can only write with a ballpoint pen, with a Rolling Writer, they're called, a black Rolling Writer on a lined yellow legal pad on a certain kind of clipboard. And then someone else types it.
INTERVIEWER: And someone else edits?
BLOOM: No one edits. I edit. I refuse to be edited. — Harold Bloom

Where history concerns mainly personalities, the drawings become either black or white according to the interests of the writer. — Isaac Asimov

'The Ballad of Black Tom' was written, in part, during the latest round of arguments about H. P. Lovecraft's legacy as both a great writer and a prejudiced man. I grew up worshipping the guy, so this issue felt quite personal to me. — Victor LaValle

Sometimes I'll hear a phrase or a word and write it down in my little black notebook (a writer's best mate), then come back to it and work a plot around it. — Paul Kane

I write flawed characters. Ones that do not always make the best decisions and are driven by ambition or lust. They are not black or white, they are in the large space that exists between. — Kevin James Breaux

Someday I would like to be the kind of writer who barrels through a draft, but I can't even seem to barrel through an interview like this, so I imagine I have a long way to go. — Holly Black

I AM GRATEFUL FOR ALL OF THE
BACKSTABBING
BECAUSE IT MADE ME
A STRAIGHT-SHOOTER! — Qwana M. BabyGirl Reynolds-Frasier

Here's what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite. Put me into a crusader's armor, a cardinal's vestments. Let me feel the pygmy's heartbeat, the queen's breast, the torturer's pleasure, the Nile's taste, or the nomad's thirst. Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back. — Pat Conroy

I'm a black writer from Mississippi. That's what I most consider myself. — Kiese Laymon

It's always hard when you're playing someone for a lot of people out there who are going to see the movie after reading the books. There's a communion between a reader and the writer, so people will have an idea who Sirius Black is and I might not be everyone's idea of that. — Gary Oldman

Books are frozen voices, in the same way that musical scores are frozen music. The score is a way of transmitting the music to someone who can play it, releasing it into the air where it can once more be heard. And the black alphabet marks on the page represent words that were once spoken, if only in the writer's head. They lie there inert until a reader comes along and transforms the letters into living sounds. The reader is the musician of the book: each reader may read the same text, just as each violinist plays the same piece, but each interpretation is different. — Margaret Atwood

We have plenty to learn from the numerous ants. Sawako Nakayasu-writer, antologist, Baudelaire's sister-turns daily life inside out and upside down then puts it into perfect little boxes. Here we follow the lines of black legged, syntactical units-the words-as they cross and they tickle the heart of the matter with us. — John Granger

I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither ... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger. — Toni Morrison

Holly Black is the Real Thing: a gifted writer with a solid grounding in what matters. Her stories are dark and splendid blooms rising from roots sunk deep in myth and tradition. — Ellen Kushner

Look how black the sky is, the writer said. I made it that way. — Bret Easton Ellis

I think in life there is only one absolute truth.
Death ... It's the only definitive horizon, sometime it leaps, runs across mountains and vanishes beyond oceans but the closer you get, the more you see and you know it is the final destination, the absolute truth. We are only living to die. — Crystal Evans

Paul Robeson was an athlete, Rutgers valedictorian, lawyer, writer, actor in movies and plays, great voice - a black male doing it all, back when some people thought he shouldn't. One reason I do all the things I do is to break stereotypes that people can only do certain things. — Dhani Jones

Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call literature is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche. — Toni Morrison

At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good. — Walter Mosley

I'm not a fast writer, and I find the process of writing a first draft to be painful and frustrating. Usually, I start with a character, a premise, and some image that gives me a particular feeling. — Holly Black

I'm not a great joke writer, which is odd for a comic to say, but I'm not. — Lewis Black

And let's debunk one bit of writer myth while we're here: Doing a seventeenth revision on a project does not make a writer an artist or move him above the writer hoi polloi any more than dressing entirely in black or wearing tweed jackets with leather elbow patches or big, black drover coats. These are all affectations, and smack of dilettantism. Real writers, and real artists, finish books and move on to the next project. — Holly Lisle

So there we were on that ice floe, just the two of us, adrift in the polar night. Viskovitz turned and said, "I'd like you to get our conversation down in black and white."
"It's not possible," I answered. "I'm not a typist. I'm not a writer. I'm a penguin. As far as I'm concerned 'getting it down in black and white' means making more penguins."
So instead, there I was a month later, standing still with an egg under my belly, remembering...
I was the one who had brought up the subject. — Alessandro Boffa

I'm so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer. — Bell Hooks

An attraction to self-discovery and self-expression can be uplifting and assist us combat epic boredom. The toll of writing truthfully as possible can cause the writer to spiral emotionally out of control. Writing's tempest temperament can prove a fatal attraction and many notable writers succumbed to the dark knight's powerful sword. Too many writers and a cast of dead poets found themselves dangerously adrift on the flowing river of black ink interlocked in a life and death struggle with the creative streams of impulsion colliding with the rocky pods of madness. All artists must fight off the impulse to surrender to the aftershock of madness. The mad vein of stabbing pain that we might think belongs exclusively to ourselves is in actuality the capstone of the blood sport known as communal anxiety. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I too have read his version of the facts. Like you and millions of others. And everyone got the picture, right from the start: He had a man's name; my brother had the name of an incident. He could have called him "Two P.M.," like that other writer who called his black man "Friday. — Kamel Daoud

This is the thing that troubles me, for I cannot forget Carcosa where black stars hang in the heavens; where the shadows of men's thoughts lengthen in the afternoon, when the twin suns sink into the lake of Hali; and my mind will bear for ever the memory of the Pallid Mask. I pray God will curse the writer, as the writer has cursed the world with its beautiful stupendous creation, terrible in its simplicity, irresistible in its truth
a world which now trembles before the King In Yellow. — Robert W. Chambers

I was a young black man, light-skinned enough so that four out of five people who met me, of whatever race, assumed I was white ... I was a homosexual who now knew he could function heterosexually.
And I was a young writer whose early attempts had already gotten him a handful of prizes ...
So, I thought, you are neither black nor white.
You are neither male nor female.
And you are that most ambiguous of citizens, the writer.
There was something at once very satisfying and very sad, placing myself at this pivotal suspension. It seemed, in the park at dawn, a kind of revelation
a kind of center, formed of a play of ambiguities, from which I might move in any direction. — Samuel R. Delany

I managed to get a short film with Channel 4 Films. I cast a young actor who'd done a bit of television before, a young actor called Ewan McGregor. That was very first thing. This writer had won this competition, and I made this little short, black and white movie. I think for both Ewan and I it was the start of our careers. — Justin Chadwick

All you had to say was, 'I am a writer,' and you became one. You didn't even have to write anything. You could just sit in a coffee shop with a notebook and stare into space, with a slightly bemused look on your face, judging the weight of the world with a jaundiced eye. As you can see, you can be completely full of shit and still be a writer ... I also thought it was going to be a great way to meet girls, but it wasn't
probably because as I was staring into space, I no doubt looked mildly retarded. You see, I wanted to write plays, which in retrospect is a lot harder than learning Mandarin, I think. How I ended up in this delusional state shall be saved for another time. — Lewis Black

When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed. — Tea Obreht

Antiheroes
Aren't just black and white; they exploit the mystery and allure of shadow, of shades of grey. For the writer, they offer more story possibilities than heroes. They could tip either way, either supporting or fighting him. Reformed antiheroes could revert to bad ways, and even on the side of good, but they cab still use methods that would make a true hero blush or flinch. The only problem is that the characteristics that make them antiheroes can, if use for good, transform them into heroes; and then life tends to be much less entertaining. — Helen McCarthy

The writer in any field, and particularly the television writer, runs into "dry periods" - weeks or months when it seems that everything he writes goes the rounds and ultimately gets nowhere. This is not only a bad moment but an endless one. I remember a five-month period late in 1952 when my diet consisted chiefly of black coffee and fingernails. I'd written six half-hour television plays and each one had been rejected at least five times. What this kind of thing does to a family budget is obvious; and what it does to the personality of the writer is even worse. — Rod Serling

From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer. — Samuel R. Delany

Every writer has their rituals. For me, it's morning walks along the beach. And then, in my study I have a huge painting of the Black Madonna hung over my desk, and quite a few pictures of Mary around me for inspiration. — Sue Monk Kidd

The sickness is to sit at the base of the lighthouse staring into nothing. The lighthouse is black, the sea is black, the writer's jacket is also black. — Roberto Bolano

I'm a writer, not a DJ. I don't take requests. — Kate LeDonne Black

He traced her arched eyebrow. "Every morning when I wake up with you at my side, you're more beautiful than yesterday. — Lindsay McKenna

You can win more arguments then you might think as a writer, even though you legally have no recourse, and your script can get muddied and altered in any way possible. You can use reason, logic, and passion to argue persuasively for a case in your favor. — Shane Black

I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to 'real life' - he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit. In fact, 'Slaughterhouse-Five' seemed to be saying that our most profound experiences may require this artistic uncoupling from the actual. The black box is meant to change us. If the change will be greater via the use of invented, absurd material, so be it. — George Saunders

Now I began to understand art as a kind of black box the reader enters. He enters in one state of mind and exits in another. The writer gets no points just because what's inside the box bears some linear resemblance to "real life"
he can put whatever he wants in there. What's important is that something undeniable and nontrivial happens to the reader between entry and exit. — George Saunders

The night it falls
The stars shine through
The inky black
That is the cue
For plot demands
That dreams be sown
The fantasies
I have alone
The words come fast
They flow like wine
I am the midnight writer... — Virginia Alison

I feel enormously blessed to be a successful black woman writer in this culture, but I have found my small fame, such as it is, to be very isolating ... because I think that especially for black women, the more we rise from the bottom, the more we move and journey, the more we are the targets of the most brutal and vicious attacks. — Bell Hooks

And I've already spent too much time Doing things I didn't want to So if I want to drink alone dressed like a pirate Or look like a dyke Or wear high heels and lipstick Or hide in a convent Or try to be mayor Or marry a writer Smoke crack and slash tires Make jokes you don't like Or paint ducks and retire You can bet your black ass that I'm going to. - from An Evening With Neil Gaiman & Amanda Palmer, 2013 — Amanda Palmer

Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books." You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I'm not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man. — Malcolm X

["Manning Up"'s] essays definitely nuance the idea of transitioning into a "shared manhood" (much like feminists of color have complicated the idea of "shared womanhood"). Trans men don't all transition to just become "men," which was one of the projects' cornerstone concepts. They become black men, white men, queer men, straight men, working class men, affluent men, fatherly men, single men, spiritual men, etc. etc. All of these mean different things when filtered through social and intimate, familial lenses.

One major boon of the growth in transgender literature ... is that we get to tease out these complexities in lives that will be popularly portrayed as monolithic unless we provide counter-scripts."

- from a National Book Critics Circle interview with writer Rigoberto Gonzalez — Mitch Kellaway

The concept of a writer writing a vivid and accurate scene in a language transparent and devoid of decoration so that we see through to the object without writerly distraction suffers the same contradiction as the concept of a painter painting a vivid and accurate scene with pigments transparent and devoid of color, including white and black - so that the paint will not get between us and the picture. — Samuel R. Delany

A plane flies overhead and inside it is a writer who has spent most of his life as a law clerk, even though he's always known deep down that he's a writer. For the first time, he's worked out what he wants to write, what the truth really is. He begs a napkin and a pen off the air hostess and he writes down the most beautiful sentence ever written, as the engine catches fire outside and the plane starts its plummet to the ground. It doesn't matter to him. It's the only sentence he's ever written and it is the last and no part of him cares. The sentence falls through the air with singed, black edges and comes to rest in a tree, in a park, miles away. One day, around ten years from now, an old widow of an astronaut will find it when a strong breeze finally blows it from its hiding place. She will read it and she will weep. — Pleasefindthis

I was challenged to a fistfight by Margo Jefferson, the Pulitzer Prize winner, New York Times writer, who is part of a feminist clique at the Times, which believes that Black men are the principal threat to the women of the world. — Ishmael Reed

A lot of my books deal with very controversial issues that most people often don't want to talk about, issues that, in my country, are more likely to get put under the carpet than get discussed. And when you talk about moral conundrums, about shades of gray, what you're doing is asking the people who want the world to be black and white to realize instead that maybe it's all right if it isn't. I know you'll learn something picking up my books, but my goal as a writer is not to teach you but to make you ask more questions. — Steven Tyler

I never liked my father. He really was a dullard and misanthrope. My mother and he were married for 22, years and it was an ill match. She encouraged me to be a writer. She opened her home to black friends, and this was the 1950s. She didn't care later when I write about her. — Edmund White

I don't necessarily self-identify as a writer, 'cause it implies a certain level of intelligence. — Michael Ian Black

I began to meditate upon the writer's life. It is full of tribulation. First he must endure poverty and the world's indifference; then, having achieved a measure of success, he must submit to a good grace of its hazards...But he has one compensation, Whenever he has anything on his mind, whether it be a harassing reflection, grief at the death of a friend, unrequited love, wounded pride, anger at the treachery of someone to whom he has shown kindness, in short any emotion or any perplexing thought, he has only to put it down in black and white, using it as a theme of a story or the decoration of an essay, to forget all about it. He is the only free man. — W. Somerset Maugham

People are tagged with other labels that point to the lowest-status group they belong to, as in "woman doctor" or "black writer," but never "white lawyer" or male senator". Any category that lowers our status relative to others' can be used to mark us; to be privileged is to go through life with the relative ease of being unmarked. — Allan G. Johnson

You can have a dark heart and be a writer, but you can't have a black one.. — John Geddes

Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go. — A. L. Kennedy

And besides, I'm not a writer. I don't go to coffeehouses and smoke, wear black, and analyze Sylvia Plath to the point of depression. — Megan McCafferty

Bridezellia was like General Patton she had an Operations Room, HQ established in her sitting room. Wall charts, to do lists, pictures, contact lists, mood charts, a calendar, list of dates and jobs were marked off with daily duties in her thick black diary. Her second in command was Saoirse, her local wedding planner. Nothing was going to be left to chance and nobody was going to ruin her prefect day. No expense was to be spared and fools were not suffered gladly. Raised voices were constantly heard in her phone calls to suppliers. Her personality changed and she became a hot head, losing her patience easily. Nobody entered her sitting room, the twilight zone without an invitation — Annette J. Dunlea

I hear you're quite the writer. Quite the teacher's pet."
"I ... I don't know what you mean."
"No? The maybe you're in for a surprise. A maybe it won't be a nice one."
Kate heard her voice lashing out, braver than she felt.
"I don't know what you're talking about. But nothing that pertains to me is any of your business.'
The match hissed again. She saw his black, black eyes flickering.
"You're right. How inconsiderate of me."
Shaken, Kate willed her feet to move her forward.
"You should be more careful," Pearce said. "Anyone could find your key. Anyone could get into your cabin."
Kate whirled to face him. "I have a roommate. I'm not alone."
"A roommate?" And he sounded like he was smiling ... a dark strange smile as if she'd said something particularly funny. "If someone wanted to get you," Pearce said slowly, and another match went out, "a roommate wouldn't stop them. They'd just get you. Wouldn't they? — Richie Tankersley Cusick

You should never rely on interviews with musicians as being factual. Most of them are mangled and even have made up stuff in them, that is to say, made up stuff by the writer or editor. — Frank Black

I'm an aspiring writer.' I hate that phrase. You're either a writer or you're not. — Jake Black

I was deeply influenced by the sartorial practices of both preachers and jazz musicians and actually Masha in Act One of Anton Chekhov, my favorite writer's master piece,Three Sisters,when she arrives reflecting on whether they're ever going to get to Moscow, memories of the death of their father, and she's in black, and she says I'm in mourning for the world, saying in part that I have a sad soul and a cheerful disposition. — Cornel West

I am a writer, a professional journalist with serious credentials in Crime, Craziness, and Politics. I have mingled with dangerous criminals and attended many trials ... from Hell's Angels, Black Panthers and Chicano street fighters to Roxanne Pulitzer and even Richard Nixon, back in the good old days before he was run out of the White House for fraud, perjury, graft, and criminal negligence. — Hunter S. Thompson

When I try to describe myself to God I say, "Lord, remember me? Black? Female? Six-foot tall? The writer?" And I almost always get God's attention. — Maya Angelou

It's the fear of being mistaken for Joyce that has always ensured that I ignore the box marked "biracial" and tick the box marked "black" on any questionnaire I fill out, and call myself unequivocally a black writer and roll my eyes at anyone who insists that Obama is not the first black president but the first biracial one. But I also know in my heart that it's an equivocation; I know that Obama has a double consciousness, is black and, at the same time, white, as I am, unless we are suggesting that one side of a person's genetics and cultural heritage — Zadie Smith

Neither black/red/yellow nor woman but poet or writer. For many of us, the question of priorities remains a crucial issue. Being merely "a writer" without a doubt ensures one a status of far greater weight than being "a woman of color who writes" ever does. Imputing race or sex to the creative act has long been a means by which the literary establishment cheapens and discredits the achievements of non-mainstream women writers. She who "happens to be" a (non-white) Third World member, a woman, and a writer is bound to go through the ordeal of exposing her work to the abuse and praises and criticisms that either ignore, dispense with, or overemphasize her racial and sexual attributes. Yet the time has passed when she can confidently identify herself with a profession or artistic vocation without questioning and relating it to her color-woman condition. — Trinh T. Minh-ha

When you write for a living and you can't do anything else, you know that sooner or later that the deadline is going to come screaming down on you like a goddamn banshee. There's no avoiding it ... So one day you just don't appear at the El Adobe bar anymore; you shut the door, paint the windows black, rent an electric typewriter and become the monster you always were - the writer. — Hunter S. Thompson

These forms of criticism that make black women the privileged readers of a black woman writer go against Hurston's own grain. She saw things otherwise: "When I set my hat at a certain angle and saunter down Seventh Avenue. . . . the cosmic Zora emerges. . . . How can anybody deny themselves the pleasure of my company? It's beyond me!" This is exactly right. No one should deny themselves the pleasure of Zora - of whatever color or background or gender. — Zadie Smith

The true paradox is arresting because it breaks all laws, but calming because it breaks all laws, but calming because that is so easy in language. it is easy to write that black is white, that up is down and that good is evil. It's as easy as typing, and as difficult. I can't do it, and I just did. But by breaking the laws of the universe, the true paradox lifts us out of it. The true paradox is, necessarily, a mystical moment, despite the fact that from a writer's point of view it's immensely easy. — Mark Forsyth

Carefully squeezing through the forest of adults that crowded the aisles, feeling like an intruder in a forbidden temple, he cautiously pushed deeper into the newsstand and found a new paperback by a writer whose novel about vampires he had read and reread until the cover was falling apart. There had been an all-black cover on the vampire book. This new one gleamed like polished chrome. It was called THE SHINING, but it cost $2.50 and he had spent all but $1.25 of his weekly allowance on some STAR WARS stuff at the mall. — C. Dean Andersson

Publishing a novel is often likened to having a baby. It is much worse to that. It is like giving birth to something with cloven hooves, a monster in a black and white mask. Characters must reveal a blend of good and bad qualities with distinguishing tics and mannerisms. It obliges the writer to clear the mist from the mirror to see who you really are in order to establish who they really are. — Chloe Thurlow

A reader seldom peruses a book with pleasure until he knows whether the writer of it be a black man or a fair man, of a mild or choleric disposition, married or a bachelor. — Joseph Addison