American Quote by Kevin Young

It is true that race is a social fiction, a myth perpetuated by a variety of peoples throughout the modern period, especially, to further…

— Michael Eric Dyson

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority. The universal in the novel-and isn't that what we're all clamoring for these…

— Ralph Ellison

All novels are about certain minorities: the individual is a minority.

— Ralph Ellison

It was always a false assumption that white American writers cannot write novels about race unless they're approaching it from a very oblique angle.

— Jess Row

My book had a universal theme. It's not a "racial" novel. It portrays an aspect of civilization, not necessarily Southern civilization.

— Harper Lee

For both writer and reader, the novel is a lonely, physically inactive affair. Only the imagination races.

— Mary McCarthy

Ironically, white America will catapult books about race to the top of the best-seller list, even as racism remains a national open wound. Obsession…

— Marita Golden

“The story of race has become a self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating prophecy as the story creates the ideas, which then reinforce the story.”

— Debby Irving

I do think that I have a sensitivity to the depictions of maybe all minorities in literature. And I think that the experience of…

— Rumaan Alam

It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors…

— Jesmyn Ward

I guess you could say I've written a lot about one thing as a journalist. But I hardly ever saw it as exclusively about…

— Alex Tizon

Race as a subject only comes about because of what I look like. If I say something truthfully, people say "Oh, she's so angry."…

— Jamaica Kincaid