Part of my ancestry is Cherokee. And in that tradition, you become an adult when you're 52.
— Alice Walker
I never talk about my next project.
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 know from having had a child, and from having been a child myself, that children will copy you.
My interest in creating anything is that it be useful.
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 want the Israeli government to be made accountable for its behaviour to the Palestinians, and I want the people of the U.S. to cease acting as if they don't understand what is going on.
You don't always have to be doing something. You can just be, and that's plenty.
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 understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. Walking in the woods, I felt in touch with the universe and with the spirit of the universe.
It is important to remember yourself.
I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.
People really had a problem with my disinterest in submission. They had a problem with my intellect, and they had a problem with my choice of lovers. They had a problem with my choice of everything.
I cry so much less than I used to. I used to be one of the most teary people.
I have a collective sense of suffering.
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's very hard for our parents who see us enter a world that they can't imagine.
Since the time of the witch burnings, the grandmothers and the healers and the midwives have been systematically targeted. And burned at the stake for hundreds of years, decimating whole communities.
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 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.
As far as a glass ceiling, I feel that all you can do is give it your absolute best with whatever gifts the universe has given you. And if you make it in some way that other people can recognize, that's fine. But even if you don't quote-unquote make it, you're fine if you've given it your whole heart and soul.
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.
I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.
It's a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they're different. It's very limiting.
Once you feel loved by the universe, you're already accepted, and you're not really concerned about offending people.
I'm tri-racial: African-American, Native American and Euro - that's the Scotch-Irish part.
Some writers sit down without a thought of what they are going to say, and they go through draft after draft.
You have to give others the opportunity to love who you love. If they don't accept it, it's their loss.
On a spiritual level, it's as though with my sighted eye I see what's before me, and with my unsighted eye I see what's hidden. It's illuminated life more than darkened it.
If you deny people their own voice, you'll have no idea of who they were.
Part of our tradition as black women is that we are universalists. Black children, yellow children, red children, brown children, that is the black woman's normal, day-to-day relationship. In my family alone, we are about four different colors.
Some people are painters, and some are ballet dancers, and I'm a writer.
My parents were both storytellers. They always spoke with metaphorical richness.
I know black people love the idea that we finally have a beautiful, good-looking black president. But if he is doing awful things to us, we should wake up.
For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.
We must begin seeing other creatures as equal. Existence makes us all equal.
I live a very secluded life, a very contemplative life and a very meditative one. That is my ideal life.
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.
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.
If we want to fight people in the world, we should fight them with pillows - pillows stuffed with food, medicine, music... That would be so much cheaper than bombs.
The fact is that when you do something from your heart, you leave a heart print.
There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.
What's really hard is that you could care a lot for someone and not want to live with him anymore.
We should not look down on our first ancestors.
Nobody has ever convinced me that race is real.
It is because I recognize the brutality with which my own multi-branched ancestors have been treated that I can identify the despicable, lawless, cruel, and sadistic behavior that has characterized Israel's attempts to erase a people, the Palestinians, from their own land.
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.
I believe you mother everybody, not in a cloying, hovering way, but taking care of what is around you.
I think all documentaries leave out areas of people's lives. Which is good. There are areas that need not be explored.
'Fame' exhausts me.
