I think America has always been polarized.
— Alice Walker
It is natural to want to have a future.
I just feel that 'The Color Purple,' which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.
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.
I prefer to praise people and the world rather than criticize them and it.
The dropping of bombs on people - isn't that terrorism?
I deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine.
I'm still living at least five parallel lives, honestly! I wonder about it. I have no idea how that happens.
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.
When I joined the freedom movement in Mississippi in my early 20s, it was to come to the aid of sharecroppers, like my parents, who had been thrown off the land they'd always known - the plantations - because they attempted to exercise their 'democratic' right to vote.
I think war is so incredibly backward, and I don't think it's intelligent, and it's not sane. So why would you want to support it?
Most damage that others do us is out of fear, humiliation and pain. Those feelings occur in all of us, not just in those of us who profess a certain religious or racial devotion.
Life is abundant, and life is beautiful. And it's a good place that we're all in, you know, on this earth, if we take care of it.
My family was a poor farming family, and we lived under absolute segregation.
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.
I live on the West Coast of the United States, and yet the air that I breathe is sometimes the same air that was being breathed in China the day before.
I start each book when it's ready and never before.
Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.
If you want to have a life that is worth living, a life that expresses your deepest feelings and emotions and cares and dreams, you have to fight for it.
Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.
Artists have a responsibility to speak and to act when governments fail, and if we don't do that, we really deserve the world we get.
I don't generally read reviews.
My mother had bought a sewing machine for me. When I went away to college, she gave me a sewing machine, a typewriter and a suitcase, and my mother made $17 a week working as a maid 12 hours a day, and she did that for me.
I love the women's movement, and I never thought of it as belonging to any particular segment of the population.
So many killings of black men in my lifetime. The physical shock is astounding.
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.
We must do everything in our power to cease the behaviour that makes children everywhere feel afraid.
A good model of how to 'work with the enemy' internally is presented by the Dalai Lama, in his endless caretaking of his soul as he confronts the Chinese government that invaded Tibet.
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 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 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.
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 have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.
You cannot see the changes that you're dreaming about, because they're internal.
I think the War on Terror is really absurd, especially coming from a country that is founded on terrorism.
I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.
Even with all of the things that are so awful, if you walk into your yard and stay there looking at almost anything for five minutes, you will be stunned by how marvelous life is and how incredibly lucky we are to have it.
My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.
I grew up in the South under segregation. So, I know what terrorism feels like - when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn't look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. I mean, that's terrorism, too.
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 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.
Howard Zinn was magical as a teacher. Witty, irreverent, and wise, he loved what he was teaching and clearly wanted his students to love it, also.
I made my first white women friends in college; they loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered.
One child must never be set above another, even in casual conversation, not to mention in speeches that circle the globe.
We must, all of us, learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.
I have such respect for 'Democracy Now!'
There are thousands of Palestinians in prison virtually for no reason.
One of the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement is that when you travel through the South today, you do not feel overwhelmed by a residue of grievance and hate.
It is crucial that young people are taught sustainable child production and rearing.
We have to wake up. We have to refuse to be a clone.
