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.

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?

I'm still living at least five parallel lives, honestly! I wonder about it. I have no idea how that happens.

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.