Alice Walker Quotes

I don’t have this feeling that 70 is really old.

A writer’s heart, a poet’s heart, an artist’s heart, a musician’s heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world.

I think war is so incredibly backward, and I don’t think it’s intelligent, and it’s not sane. So why would you want to support it?

Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.

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.

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 have a collective sense of suffering.

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

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.

Creation is a sustained period of bliss, even though the subject can still be very sad. Because there’s the triumph of coming through and understanding that you have, and that you did it the way only you could do it. You didn’t do it the way somebody told you to do it.

Sucking up to the biggies won’t get us anywhere.

The most important question in the world is, ‘Why is the child crying?’

People who work hard often work too hard. … May we learn to honor the hammock, the siesta, the nap and the pause in all its forms.

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

I gave my archive to Emory University because there’s a really dear friend who teaches there, Rudolph Byrd, and he’s the editor.

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

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.