Alice Walker
I think that wealthy white people would like to have a country that resembles the Fifties, when all the minorities were tucked away in ghettos and paid in very low wages but on the surface it was very bright and shiny and free and the rest of the world would look on it longingly.
We have to wake up. We have to refuse to be a clone.
My interest in creating anything is that it be useful.
My life is not to be somebody else's impact - you know what I mean?
I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.
It is important to remember yourself.
Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
The dropping of bombs on people - isn't that terrorism?
There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation.
I see children, all children, as humanity's most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left.
You know, one race will not be a survivor if the other one dies, and that's something that we should think about.
If you deny people their own voice, you'll have no idea of who they were.
You have to give others the opportunity to love who you love. If they don't accept it, it's their loss.
Some writers sit down without a thought of what they are going to say, and they go through draft after draft.
Well, capitalism is a big problem, because with capitalism you're just going to keep buying and selling things until there's nothing else to buy and sell, which means gobbling up the planet.
I just feel that 'The Color Purple,' which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.
Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.
Tea to the English is really a picnic indoors.
We must begin seeing other creatures as equal. Existence makes us all equal.
Once you feel loved by the universe, you're already accepted, and you're not really concerned about offending people.
My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.
All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.
I've always felt quite singular, even as a child. That I must stay on track to keep my purpose.
There are thousands of Palestinians in prison virtually for no reason.
We should not look down on our first ancestors.
I have a collective sense of suffering.
I start each book when it's ready and never before.
I'm tri-racial: African-American, Native American and Euro - that's the Scotch-Irish part.
I don't generally read reviews.
I think Americans generally are not used to working very hard, in terms of working for the collective. I think in our country we have taken individualism to its farthest reaches, possibly.
I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America's really large shadow and that's not all that bad.
I love the natural world - it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved.
I'm entirely interested in people, and also other creatures and beings, but especially in people, and I tend to read them by emotional field more than anything. So I have a special interest in what they're thinking and who they are and who's hiding behind those eyes and how did he get there, and what's the story, really?
People tend to think that life really does progress for everyone eventually, that people progress, but actually only some people progress. The rest of the people don't.
David Icke reminded me of Malcolm X.
My parents were both storytellers. They always spoke with metaphorical richness.
In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be afraid.
Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.
I continue to care for President Obama and for his family. I think that in many ways they are very courageous people, and I honor that, because I know what it means to live as a black person in a racist America.
I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.
It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's 'mature' critics often are.
I advocate that every woman be a part of a circle, and a circle that meets at least once a month, or if you can't do that, once every two months or every four months.
I wanted in my lifetime to vote for a radical Native American woman, since my vision of any future that we might have is that it will be led by women and older women.
So many killings of black men in my lifetime. The physical shock is astounding.
I think many people in my community had very different kinds of mothers: they had mothers who acquiesced in the system of male and white-supremacist domination, and my mother never did. She just could not do it. It just wasn't in her.
Nobody has ever convinced me that race is real.
What's really hard is that you could care a lot for someone and not want to live with him anymore.
All partisan movements add to the fullness of our understanding of society as a whole. They never detract; or, in any case, one must not allow them to do so. Experience adds to experience.
Human beings may well be unable to break free of the dictatorship of greed that spreads like a miasma over the world, but no longer will we be an inarticulate and ignorant humanity, confused by our enslavement to superior cruelty and weaponry.