Alice Walker
I'm for women choosing whatever they want to do but they have to really know what they are doing.
I'm very disappointed in Obama. I was very much in support of him in the beginning, but I cannot support war. I cannot support droning. I cannot support capitulating to the banks.
I gave my archive to Emory University because there's a really dear friend who teaches there, Rudolph Byrd, and he's the editor.
I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine.
War contributes greatly to global warming, which shouldn't surprise us. All those bombs going off, all those rockets, all those planes and helicopters. All that fuel of various kinds being used. It pollutes the air and water of this very fragile and interconnected planet.
It's not possible to stop love.
My mother was very strong. Once, she picked up a coconut and smashed it against my father's head. It taught me about women defending themselves and not collapsing in a heap.
Fiction is such a world of freedom, it's wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.
I prefer to praise people and the world rather than criticize them and it.
I cry so much less than I used to. I used to be one of the most teary people.
The trouble with our people is as soon as they got out of slavery they didn't want to give the white man nothing else. But the fact is, you got to give em something. Either your money, your land, your woman or your ass.
In the summer of 1966, I went to Mississippi to be in the heart of the civil-rights movement, helping people who had been thrown off the farms or taken off the welfare roles for registering to vote. While working there, I met the civil-rights lawyer I later married - we became an interracial couple.
It is natural to want to have a future.
I met Howard Zinn in 1961, my first year at Spelman College in Atlanta. He was the tall, rangy, good-looking professor that many of the girls at Spelman swooned over.
I have never felt that the one thing that I am 'known for' is what I am.
I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.
How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?
I don't feel I've had a decent critic ever on the East coast.
Part of what confuses people in times of upheaval is that you're getting so many different points of view and directions and so and so, how to do this and do that. And a lot of it is written in a language that honestly most people cannot understand.
I started writing as a child. But I didn't think of myself actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something - no, maybe junior - and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.
I think that all people who feel that there is injustice in the world anywhere should learn as much of it as they can bear. That is our duty.
'Fame' exhausts me.
My parents taught me service - not by saying, but by doing. That was my culture, the culture of my family.
I think that I do feel that my nature is to express what this self, this particular self at this time, experiences in the world. And that is so organic - I use this metaphor a lot but I'll use it again - it's like a pine tree producing pine cones, or a blackberry bush producing blackberries - it's just what happens with this being, now.
It's very hard for our parents who see us enter a world that they can't imagine.
I believe you mother everybody, not in a cloying, hovering way, but taking care of what is around you.
I see myself in all the people in the world who are suffering and who are very badly treated and who are often made to feel that they have no place on this Earth.
It's an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important... and to feel that you're being published by people who really don't get it and/or don't really care.
June Jordan, who died of cancer in 2002, was a brilliant, fierce, radical, and frequently furious poet. We were friends for thirty years. Not once in that time did she step back from what was transpiring politically and morally in the world. She spoke up, and led her students, whom she adored, to do the same.
For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.
Sucking up to the biggies won't get us anywhere.
Women have to be extremely careful about choosing something that they consider an act of defiance that can really be used to further their enslavement.
You bring children into the world. You love them with heart and soul.
I consider the fact that thousands of children die each day from starvation and a lack of medicine a crisis for humanity and a problem we must collectively attempt to solve.
I used to meditate all the time in bed. That was when I was raising my daughter, and I'd get her up and off to school, and then I would go back to bed and meditate. And then I would do the same in the evening, and that was very good for that period because I had so many things to juggle as a single mother.
Part of my ancestry is Cherokee. And in that tradition, you become an adult when you're 52.
I just think cities are unnatural, basically. I know there are people who live happily in them, and I have cities that I love, too. But it's a disaster that we have moved so far from nature.
I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking to any leader - or any person - in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks.
I think all documentaries leave out areas of people's lives. Which is good. There are areas that need not be explored.
At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.
I think the War on Terror is really absurd, especially coming from a country that is founded on terrorism.
It no longer bothers me that I may be constantly searching for father figures; by this time, I have found several and dearly enjoyed knowing them all.
I'm sure we, the American people, are the butt of jokes by those in power.
I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.
I love us so incredibly, insanely deeply; it's almost unbearable to see what we do to ourselves.
Some people are painters, and some are ballet dancers, and I'm a writer.
I feel very happy to be living in Berkeley because there are a lot of people who are politically active here.
People have so many hang-ups about how other people live their lives. People always want to keep you in a little box, or they need to label you and fix you in time and location.
America is not nearly done. We're only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows... what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants - if they survive that long - will see.