This trivializing rhetoric runs the subtle but unmistakable message: pray if you like, worship if you must, but whatever you do, do not on any account take your religion seriously.

I think that black fiction authors have to work very hard to avoid being typed as seeking only a black audience.

The very aspect of religions that many of their critics most fear – that the religiously devout, in the name of their faith, take positions that differ from approved state policy – is one of their strengths.

I bristle again. I have never liked being called clever, especially by residents of the paler nation. It never quite means the same thing as intelligent or even bright, but carries instead an intimation of a low animal cunning. Perhaps the semiotician in me overreacts in assuming that conversations are racially charged; but so many conversations are.

We often ask our citizens to split their public and private selves, telling them in effect that it is fine to be religious in private, but there is something askew when those private beliefs become the basis for public action.

Even in 2012, if there’s a black character in the movies or on television that’s a professional, if we even hear about their backgrounds they’re always ’up from the streets.

There is much depressing evidence that the religious voice is required to stay out of the public square only when it is pressed in a conservative cause.

We do not credit to the ideal of religious freedom when we talk as though religious belief is something of which public-spirited adults should be ashamed.

So much emotion goes into writing fiction.

I think of my novels as entertainments.