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

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

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

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

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.

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.

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

Meditation has been a loyal friend to me. It has helped me write my books.