Black Writers Quotes

#1. I always crave to see more stories about and by people of color, particularly new work by young black writers.

Katori Hall

#2. Many theaters are tackling the multifaceted work of black writers - established and emerging. Now the next step is for them to bring in audiences of color and continue to go out to our community and create a continuous connection that extends beyond the one black show in the season.

Katori Hall

#3. We don't want to create a literary ghetto in which black writers are only allowed to write black characters and women writers are put on 'girl books.'

G. Willow Wilson

#4. I'm one of the few Black writers, or African American writers, who managed to work my way through the system so that it has allowed me to speak in a kind of free way. But most African American writers don't have that. They don't have that opportunity, they don't have that.

James McBride

#5. I do think it's important for black writers to show that we too can make it into the mainstream. Growing up, I didn't just watch The Cosby Show, I watched Growing Pains and Family Ties too. We can tell those stories too.

Lena Waithe

#6. American violence is public life, it's a public way of life, it became a form, a detective story form. So I should think that any number of black writers should go into the detective story form.

Chester Himes

#7. Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.

Audre Lorde

#8. I believe that writers run out of material, I really do. I believe very strongly in the fact that when the natural time is up, writers actually do run out of material. To me it's black and white. When there's a song there's a song, when there's not there's not.

Brian Wilson

#9. Let's face it, the great comedians now that are handicapped in the looks department are tremendous writers.

Jack Black

#10. All writers pen sad stories to garner sympathy, writing is after all for the abandoned of the society: the ink-leech, spewing black blood and sucking innocent souls.

Aporva Kala

#11. It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as 'other.'

Jesmyn Ward

#12. Isn't it strange how the most lethal cynics are often the most optimistic creative dreamers?

Robert Black

#13. I, sole heir to the Munodi line and memory, am childless. A friend who knows such things has told me that this explains my compulsion to capture what I can with black ink on white paper." ("The Volatilized Ceiling of Baron Munodi")

Rikki Ducornet

#14. Don't live with writers. Writers are bastards.

Warren Ellis

#15. We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

Langston Hughes

#16. If we must encounter each other, let's do it the old way - in the dark, by the fire, our breaths bated, the world a big black mystery beyond us.

Meghan Tifft

#17. I think a lot of times stereotypes come when there are disconnected white writers who maybe have two or three black friends, and they write black characters, and they put them in situations that are ridiculous.

Dorian Missick

#18. We can all agree that tea is good for the body. However, tea is very good for our hair too.

Monica Millner

#19. Stories are our gifts to a world that doesn't see us.

Sarah Black

#20. Writers should cut as close to the vein as possible. The readers don't want to be covered in your warm sticky blood, but they want to come as close to it as possible.

Robert Black

#21. Most writers stick to what they know. The black experience is our experience, so it's not that challenging for us. That's why sometimes you'll see writers that start off telling black stories, but later branch out into other material. People say they "sell out." No, they evolve as writers.

Lena Waithe

#22. Over my desk, I've got this enormous bulletin board, and on it I've tacked black-and-white photographs of writers at work.

Jennifer Niven

#23. Insofar as we, critics of the black tradition, master our craft, we serve both to preserve our own traditions and to shape their direction. All great writers demand great critics.

Henry Louis Gates

#24. The artists are the most powerful ones, the creators, first are the painters, working without words, second are the music composers, and third are the writers.

Robert Black

#25. Growing up, my mom was a painter, my best friend was a painter, my husband is a painter. For a long time I knew artists, and I didn't know any writers.

Holly Black

#26. Black skin was filled with so many barriers, so many restrictions, so many.

Randi Pink

#27. The good thing about being undiscovered is that every time you begin a new writing project it feels like this work will be the best one you have done, this one will be better than the last, a higher standard of writing, and that's the way it should be.

Robert Black

#28. I started out with almost entirely black fans except for a little handful of people in the horror writers' community, and those people really liked horror, you know. They will go to any lengths and read whomever they can find because they like that feeling of being scared.

Tananarive Due

#29. We're huge fans of 'Game of Thrones' for example, 'Orphan Black.' And even though those shows don't necessarily correlate directly with 'Arrow,' I'm a very big believer that writers are the product of their inspirations.

Marc Guggenheim

#30. The illustrators work so much harder on the books than the writers do. I mean, that's so much work doing what they do, and it's terrible for them.

Michael Ian Black

#31. Hardboiled crime fiction came of age in 'Black Mask' magazine during the Twenties and Thirties. Writers like Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler learnt their craft and developed a distinct literary style and attitude toward the modern world.

Charles Frazier

#32. Writers begin with a grain of sand, and then create a beach.

Robert Black

#33. Writers and other artists are mostly just historians, produced by nature to describe, decipher and thus historically represent the universe.

Robert Black

#34. My husband and I are writers, and I wish I could write faster. There are not a lot of movies made with black actors in mind.

Gina Prince-Bythewood

#35. When I got to Grinnell College, I was part of the black turtleneck sweater and Camel cigarette crowd of poets and writers.

Peter Coyote

#36. 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

#37. I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money.' Yes, I think everybody should be paid handsomely; I insist on it, and I pay people who work for me, or with me, handsomely.

Maya Angelou

#38. 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

#39. Everyone has a story to tell but only a few of those who are competent with a gift and drive to master it into a black and white masterpiece and those people are called ghost writers.

Euginia Herlihy

#40. When I die I hope it may be said:
'Her suffering was black, but her books were read'.

Shannon L. Alder

#41. My generation of writers has been prone to premature illness and death, especially the women. When Black male writers meet it's like a session of the American Diabetic Association.

Ishmael Reed

#42. Writers usually don't get to pick our own covers. I know it's surprising to hear that.

Holly Black