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" I will always be my hardest critic. Nobody else will ever be able to come at something I do harder than I come at myself. "

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" The things I want to do mostly involve writing. "

" Imagination is a funny thing - we sometimes need to see something before we can truly picture it. "

" Every first draft sucks, so when you have your favorite novel, and you're like, 'Wow, this is a masterpiece,' and then you write your first draft, and you're like, 'This is really bad,' and then you're like 'I can't do this because this is nowhere close.' When, in reality, the book you loved so much started out just as crappy. "

" I grew up in a predominantly white community - Hinsdale, Illinois - and given that, I feel blessed because I could still count my experiences with blatant racism on two hands. I thought racism was the substitute teacher picking on you because she assumes that you're a delinquent, and she doesn't know you have the highest score in the class. "

" It's not about creating something that eight billion people would like. It's about creating something and being able to reach the maybe, like, one million people that would like it a lot. "

" The knowledge and insights you can get in just one day at a writers' conference make it worth the trip. "

" In my perfect world, we'd have one black girl fantasy book every month. We need them, and we need fantasy stories about black boys as well. "

" Part of the reason everyone is freaking out over 'Black Panther' is because we've never seen it. We have two thousand years of stories, and we've never seen it. "

" The power of fantasy is that you can make people understand the deeper realities of our world in a way that they wouldn't normally be able to because of all the things in our world that closes them off. "

" With the Internet, there are so many ways to connect with other writers who will be some of your best friends and best sources of support for your entire life. "

" With a fantasy world, it's like, this is my world. I literally made it. So if I tell you something, you do have to sit back and observe more. You need to sit back and listen more to understand what is going on or what's happening in the world. And I think there's a lot of power in that. "

" I am a firm believer that the craziest stories that have been told and are being told are in anime. They have character arcs that go over, like, 400 episodes, like a 400-episode character arc. "

" You don't realise how cool your culture is until you get out of that phase of trying to fit in. "

" For readers of color, and especially black readers, black girls, I just want them to feel seen. And not just seen - I want them to feel epic and know that they are epic. "

" I want a little black girl to pick up my book one day and see herself as the star. I want her to know that she's beautiful, and she matters, and she can have a crazy, magical adventure even if an ignorant part of the world tells her she can never be Hermione Granger. "

" I want to give something to the world that I feel I missed out on as a child, and I want to help people of all races, ethnicities, and orientations understand that no matter what differences we may think we have, everyone is a human, and everyone deserves to be respected and valued. "

" There's so much talk of representation in politics and entertainment - it's everywhere - but I didn't realize representation was important until really my senior year of high school. "

" We like epic stories, we like adventure, we like epic fights, so if you can mix a great story that can also really teach someone about a different experience, you have the potential to really help people. "

" My freshman year of college, 'The Hunger Games' movie adaptation came out, and I was really excited about it. This was maybe 2011. I loved it, but there was a lot of hateful backlash against the black characters in the film. "

" If I went to any other college, I probably would have been pre-med. But I felt like I had freedom to do what I wanted to do at Harvard. "

" My very first story, I was around 5, and I really just wrote myself. When I was 5, I loved myself so much I gave myself a twin named Tomi. Everything started out fine. But then I didn't write another black character until I was 18. "

" Children of color need a mirror to see themselves in. And then people who don't have that experience, they need a window. They need a really personalized way to see what people who are different from them are going through. "

" If you want to be traditionally published, then you most likely want to get a literary agent. To sign with an agent, you need to send them a query letter, but agents can get up to 20,000 query letters a year. With numbers like that, it helps to get in front of agents with every opportunity you have. "

" You're never wasting your time as long as you learn from every single thing you do, whether you feel like those attempts are successful or not. "

" What's demanded from us black creatives is both a blessing and a curse, because it pushes you to be your absolute best. You cannot be anything less. "

" As writers, our craft makes us sit alone at a desk and hammer away at our novel. Doing that day in and day out makes it really easy to forget that there's a whole community of writers out there, and they love contributing to other writers' success! "

" You can make something out of every unfinished story and every rejection if you work at it. "

" I've been writing stories all my life. My very first story had two little black girls riding horses. They were both me, too, so that's how into me I was. "

" Death is something that I am still trying to figure out a healthy relationship with. "

" I didn't say I have to be a writer, but I did say that I needed to publish at least one book. "