ALICE WALKER

I'm not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many men will take in seeing you choose to chain yourself - then they get to say 'See, you did it yourself.'

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?

I don't call myself a Buddhist. I'm a free spirit. I believe I'm here on earth to admire and enjoy it; that's my religion.

Once you feel loved by the universe, you're already accepted, and you're not really concerned about offending people.

We must, all of us, learn actually not to have enemies, but only confused adversaries who are ourselves in disguise.

You have to give others the opportunity to love who you love. If they don't accept it, it's their loss.

Creation is a sustained period of bliss, even though the subject can still be very sad. Because there's the triumph of coming through and understanding that you have, and that you did it the way only you could do it. You didn't do it the way somebody told you to do it.

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 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.

It's so clear that you have to cherish everyone. I think that's what I get from these older black women, that every soul is to be cherished, that every flower Is to bloom.

Clearly older women and especially older women who have led an active life or elder women who successfully maneuver through their own family life have so much to teach us about sharing, patience, and wisdom.

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.

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 deeply regret any harm, or any perceived harm, that I may have done to anyone by any behaviour of mine.

Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.

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.

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 think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.

Propaganda is amazing. People can be led to believe anything.

The most important question in the world is, 'Why is the child crying?'

I start each book when it's ready and never before.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.

People do not wish to appear foolish; to avoid the appearance of foolishness, they are willing to remain actually fools.

I think America has always been polarized.