Alice Walker

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 cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

Nobody has ever convinced me that race is real.

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

We should not look down on our first ancestors.

My family was a poor farming family, and we lived under absolute segregation.

I think America has always been polarized.

I think the War on Terror is really absurd, especially coming from a country that is founded on terrorism.

It is natural to want to have a future.

I think the foundation of everything in my life is wonder.

I just feel that 'The Color Purple,' which was my 10th book, was a true gift from my ancestors.

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.

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.

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 prefer to praise people and the world rather than criticize them and it.

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.

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

I love the women's movement, and I never thought of it as belonging to any particular segment of the population.

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.

I'm still living at least five parallel lives, honestly! I wonder about it. I have no idea how that happens.

So many killings of black men in my lifetime. The physical shock is astounding.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 have such respect for 'Democracy Now!'

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.

There are thousands of Palestinians in prison virtually for no reason.

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.

What's really hard is that you could care a lot for someone and not want to live with him anymore.

I'm tri-racial: African-American, Native American and Euro - that's the Scotch-Irish part.

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.

There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.

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

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.

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 never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

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.

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.

My interest in creating anything is that it be useful.

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.

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.

It is crucial that young people are taught sustainable child production and rearing.

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 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.