Diversity is about all of us, and about us having to figure out how to walk through this world together.

The more specific we are, the more universal something can become. Life is in the details. If you generalize, it doesn't resonate. The specificity of it is what resonates.

I think 'Miracle's Boys' made more people aware of my work.

We, as adults, are the gatekeepers, and we have to check our own fears at the door because we want our children to be smarter than we are. We want them to be more fully human than we are.

The Great Migration can get forgotten if we don't pay attention or bear witness to it. It's part of my personal history and the history of millions of African Americans who left those oppressive conditions for better lives in the North. It's important to put that on the page.

The idea of feeling isolated is scary to me - to walk through the world alone would be heartbreaking.

Readers are hungry to have their stories in the world, to see mirrors of themselves if the stories are about people like them, and to have windows if the stories are about people who have been historically absent in literature.

I always say I write because I have questions, not because I have answers. It's true that you begin the conversation - that's the role of the artist. But it's not my job to tell us what to do next. I wish I had those tools.

People want to know and understand each other across lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability.

I realized if I didn't start talking to my relatives, asking questions, thinking back to my own beginnings, there would come a time when those people wouldn't be around to help me look back and remember.

When I'm feeling frustrated with a story, I have faith that it's going to come. Also, when I first started writing, I wanted to write the stories that were not in my childhood, to represent people who hadn't historically been represented in literature.

The strength of my mother is something I didn't pay attention to for so long. Here she was, this single mom, who was part of the Great Migration, who was part of a Jim Crow south, who said, 'I'm getting my kids out of here. I'm creating opportunities for these young people by any means necessary.'

My sister taught me how to write my name when I was about three. I remember writing my whole name: Jacqueline Amanda Woodson. I just loved the power of that, of being able to put a letter on the page and that letter meaning something.

Memory doesn't come as a straight narrative. It comes in small moments with all this white space.

I think when I was a young person, there was just kind of - there was very little dialogue about it. And there was just kind of one way to be gay, right? You saw very effeminate guys. You saw very butch women. And there was no kind of in-between. And there was no - you know, there wasn't anything in the media. There wasn't anything on television.

If you have no road map, you have to create your own.

Young people are often ignored and disregarded, but they are acute observers and learners of everything we say and do.

I feel like, as a person of color, I've always been kind of doing the work against the tide.

Both racism and homophobia come from a sense of the presumed and the unknown.

I'm inspired by questions I have that I try to figure out the answers to through my writing.

In the midst of observing the world and coming to consciousness, I was becoming a writer, and what I wanted to put on the page were the stories of people who looked like me.

I still love Carson McCullers and Raymond Carver and Toni Morrison and James Baldwin.

I've wanted to be a writer since I was seven, but I didn't grow up in family where people aspired to live as writers.

I didn't have any idea of what I was getting into by going away to college. And I was scared. I was scared of failing. I was scared of it not being for me because I was going to be one of the first people in my family to go off to college.

Friendship is such an important thing to me, and I feel like the people who I love and help keep me whole - I can't imagine a life without them.

As a person of color, as a woman, as a body moving through this particular space in time, I realize the streets of New York tell the story of resistance, an African-American history of brilliance and beauty that, even in its most brutal moments, did not - could not - kill our resilient and powerful spirit.

Reading equals hope times change.

The civil rights movement was about access to public space. We had to fight for public space.

My writing is inspired by where I come from, where I am today, and where I hope to go some day.

What I write comes from a place of deep love, and a deep understanding of all kinds of otherness.

I love playing with form. I love playing with sounds... I love music, and I love writing that has a musicality to it.

The epistolary form is one of the hardest to write. It's so hard to show something that's bigger in a letter. Plus, you have to have the balance of how many letters are going to work to tell the story and how few are going to make it fall apart.

'Brown Girl Dreaming' was a book I had a lot of doubts about - mainly, would this story be meaningful to anyone besides me? My editor, Nancy Paulsen, kept assuring me, but there were moments when I was in a really sad place with the story for so many reasons. It wasn't an easy book to write - emotionally, physically, or creatively.

As a child in South Carolina, I spent summers like so many children - sitting on my grandparents' back porch with my siblings, spitting watermelon seeds into the garden or, even worse, swallowing them and trembling as my older brother and sister spoke of the vine that was probably already growing in my belly.

Each book I write is a shout into the silence and a prayer and a plea for change.

In young adult novels and children's books, you stay in moment. The story goes through a school year or a weekend. You never get a sense of a future self because the young person has not lived that yet.

I love how much love there is in the world of young adult and children's literature.

Greenville, S.C., in the 1970s is a rolling green dream in my memory now.

The South was very segregated. I mean, all through my childhood, long after Jim Crow was supposed to not be in existence, it was still a very segregated South.

I'm usually working on several things at once. If I get bored with one, I can go on to another. That way, I never get stuck.

I never know, when I start writing a story, what's going to happen, or how it will all get sorted out.

To me, elegy suggests that there is hope, and in some respects you've moved past the loss and are able to deal with it and to write about it.

I couldn't be a writer without hope. I think I became a writer because I'm pretty optimistic.

I'm usually working either on a picture book and a young adult book, or a middle grade book and a young adult book. When I get bored with one, I move to the other, and then I go back.

You can't have too many books featuring people of color, just like you can't have too many books featuring white people.

Until I was about 13, Manhattan had been a world seen from its edges.

My mother was a single mom whose days were spent as a customer service rep at Con Edison in downtown Brooklyn.

For my family, 'black-ish' is the reward on a Thursday evening - a day after the show officially airs, when it's finally available to be streamed.

By the time I was in fifth grade, I was dreaming of the Pulitzer Prize.

I would have written 'Brown Girl Dreaming' if no one had ever wanted to buy it, if it went nowhere but inside a desk drawer that my own children pulled out one day to find a tool for survival, a symbol of how strong we are and how much we've come through.