My mom was very strict. And we were very religious. So I knew that I was not allowed to do the wrong thing. And I knew that I had a home I could run to. And I had a mom.

Even after Jim Crow was supposed to not be a part of the South anymore, there were still ways in which you couldn't get away from it. And I think once I got to Brooklyn, there was this freedom we had.

I don't want my kids to have to walk through a world where they have to constantly explain who they are and who their family is.

I feel like I'm a New Yorker to the bone. But there is a lot of the South in me. I know there is a lot of the South in my mannerisms. There's a lot of the South in my expectations of other people and how people treat each other. There's a lot of the South in the way I speak, but it could never be home.

I think there is such a richness to the South and a lushness and a way of life.

When someone says to me, 'I love your book - I read it in a day,' I want to tell them to go back and read it again.

In the family, writing wasn't anything anyone understood - being a writer in the real world? How could it be? We didn't have those mirrors.

I think people are willing to talk about anything if you come to it with kindness.

With my writing, I try to do stuff I have not done before. Each time I sit down, I want to have a new experience, and by extension, I want my readers to have a different experience.

Childhood, young adulthood is fluid. And it's very easy to get labeled very young and have to carry something through your childhood and into your adulthood that is not necessarily who you are.

Labeling is not the best way to get young people to deeply engage in reading.

I don't want anyone to walk through the world feeling invisible ever again.

'Another Brooklyn' came to me in this kind of dreamlike series of vignettes.

In writing 'Another Brooklyn,' I had to imagine what happens when friendships dissolve.

If someone has something they're really passionate about, that's their brilliance, and my big question is how do we grow that passion/brilliance and/or help them grow.

I wrote all the time, and I had teachers who encouraged it.

What I learned for myself... is that no matter what the circumstances, people survive.

When I write, I don't think about messages for my readers.

Being a Witness was too closed an experience. That's what I walked away from, not the things I believe.

I deeply believe in many Christian values: love people; do the right thing; know that there's good in everyone, that God's looking out for all of us.

I feel like I am walking in some amazing footsteps of writers who have come before me, like S.E. Hinton, Walter Dean Myers, Christopher Paul Curtis, Richard Peck and Kate DiCamillo, who I love.

The hardest part is telling one's story. Once the story is on the page, the rest will come.

I love the physical act of writing as well as how I grow which each situation I put on the page.

Sometimes, when I'm sitting at my desk for long hours and nothing's coming to me, I remember my fifth-grade teacher, the way her eyes lit up when she said, 'This is really good.'