don’t worry about imagination. You have all the imagination you need, and all the reading, journal writing, and learning you will be doing will stimulate it. Play with your ideas. Have fun with them. Don’t worry about being silly or outrageous or wrong. So much of writing is fun. It’s first letting your interests and your imagination take you

I have no doubt at all that the best and the most interesting part of me is my fiction.

That’s why I’ve called this mild little essay “Furor Scribendi”—“A Rage for Writing.” “Rage,” “Positive Obsession,” “burning need to write” … Call it anything you like; it’s a useful emotion.

“Why,” she dared to ask, “do you look like a twice-live-sized, bearded white man?” In fact, seated as he was on his huge thronelike chair, he looked, she thought, like a living version of Michelangelo’s Moses, a sculpture that she remembered seeing pictured in her college art-history textbook about twenty years before. Except that God was more

When I have to deal with something that disturbs me as much as the botfly did, I write about it.

There seems to be an unwritten rule, hurtful and at odds with the realities of American culture. It says you aren’t supposed to wonder whether as a Black person, a Black woman, you really might be inferior—not quite bright enough, not quite quick enough, not quite good enough to do the things you want to do. Though, of course, you do wonder. You’re

Obsession can be a useful tool if it’s positive obsession. Using it is like aiming carefully in archery.

Read the kind of work you’d like to write. Read good literature and bad, fiction and fact. Read every day and learn from what you read.

Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.