Pearl Cleage

When you sit down to write, you have to be prepared to strip all of those voices away, all of the censors away, and talk about what you think the truth is, which I think is really the task of the writer - to get to the truth.

The historical novelist has to consider what has actually happened, while the SF writer is dealing in possibilities, but they are both in the business of imagining a world unlike our own and yet connected to it.

At one point, my house was a school for autistic children. I opened up my doors to about 30 kids and their families at the time. I was turning into Mary Poppins because I had to do something for these kids who have nowhere to go. So my house was the school for two years.