For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that. – Alice Walker
My mother was very strong. Once, she picked up a coconut and smashed it against my father’s head. It taught me about women defending themselves and not collapsing in a heap. – Alice Walker
I love the women’s movement, and I never thought of it as belonging to any particular segment of the population. – Alice Walker
I love the natural world – it comes from my culture, which grew out of a people enslaved. – Alice Walker
I can imagine in years to come that my papers and memorabilia, my journals and letters, will find themselves always in the company of people who care about many of the things I do. – Alice Walker
My parents taught me service – not by saying, but by doing. That was my culture, the culture of my family. – Alice Walker
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. – Alice Walker
I think writing really helps you heal yourself. I think if you write long enough, you will be a healthy person. That is, if you write what you need to write, as opposed to what will make money, or what will make fame. – Alice Walker
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. – Alice Walker
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. – Alice Walker
People have so many hang-ups about how other people live their lives. People always want to keep you in a little box, or they need to label you and fix you in time and location. – Alice Walker
I gave my archive to Emory University because there’s a really dear friend who teaches there, Rudolph Byrd, and he’s the editor. – Alice Walker
I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to. – Alice Walker
There are those who believe Black people possess the secret of joy and that it is this that will sustain them through any spiritual or moral or physical devastation. – Alice Walker
You know how big love is? Love is big. love can hold anger; love can even hold hatred. – Alice Walker
As an elder of the Americas and of the rest of the planet, it is my responsibility to care for and protect, to the best of my ability, the young. – Alice Walker
It’s an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important… and to feel that you’re being published by people who really don’t get it and/or don’t really care. – Alice Walker
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. – Alice Walker
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. – Alice Walker