Can people who hunger so desperately for what other people have ever have enough?

Women have to be extremely careful about choosing something that they consider an act of defiance that can really be used to further their enslavement.

My parents taught me service - not by saying, but by doing. That was my culture, the culture of my family.

How long will it take the citizens of the United States, one wonders, to recognize that the house their country bombed in Iraq is the same one they were living in until it was foreclosed?

Poetry is the lifeblood of rebellion, revolution, and the raising of consciousness.

Many readers fail to realize this, but 'The Color Purple' is a theological text. It is about the reclamation of one's original God: the earth and nature.

Women have to summon up courage to fulfill dormant dreams.

A people do not throw their geniuses away. And if they are thrown away, it is our duty as artists and as witnesses for the future to collect them again for the sake of our children and, if necessary, bone by bone.

I don't know if I've ever cared much what others think.

I've always felt quite singular, even as a child. That I must stay on track to keep my purpose.

As long as the people don't fear the truth, there is hope. For once they fear it, the one who tells it doesn't stand a chance. And today, truth is still beautiful... but so frightening.

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.

'Fame' exhausts me.

My parents were both storytellers. They always spoke with metaphorical richness.

I think all documentaries leave out areas of people's lives. Which is good. There are areas that need not be explored.

Some people are painters, and some are ballet dancers, and I'm a writer.

I have a collective sense of suffering.

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.

I cry so much less than I used to. I used to be one of the most teary people.

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.

If you deny people their own voice, you'll have no idea of who they were.

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.

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.

Nobody has ever convinced me that race is real.

It is important to remember yourself.

We should not look down on our first ancestors.

Some writers sit down without a thought of what they are going to say, and they go through draft after draft.

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.

You don't always have to be doing something. You can just be, and that's plenty.

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.

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.

My interest in creating anything is that it be useful.

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.

I know from having had a child, and from having been a child myself, that children will copy you.

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.

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.

We must begin seeing other creatures as equal. Existence makes us all equal.

I never talk about my next project.

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.

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

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

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 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.

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

I have such respect for 'Democracy Now!'

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 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.

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