Alice Walker

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

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.

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

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.

We must do everything in our power to cease the behaviour that makes children everywhere feel afraid.

One child must never be set above another, even in casual conversation, not to mention in speeches that circle the globe.

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.

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

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

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.

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.