" When you read western fiction -- and it's probably true of everywhere else, too -- you'll find that before 1920, as a rule, there were no women outside of certain roles in fiction. There were no people of color out of certain roles in history. They didn't really have a history. They were supporting characters to a broad white male story.

Those people, those characters, nobody imagined that a woman could be strong enough to knock out a man because no woman was written about like that. Nobody could imagine that a Black man could understand the theory of relativity because nobody had written about that. Nobody could imagine a sophisticated, sensitive Indian, Native American.

If you want to be in the culture, in history of the culture, considered in that history, then you have to exist in the fiction. If you don't exist in the literature of that country, your people don't exist. "

― Walter Mosley