As you know from school, it's when you have not prepared for the test that you have the fear of failing. And if you have prepared, even if you fail, you've done your best.
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.
I have fallen in love with the imagination. And if you fall in love with the imagination, you understand that it is a free spirit. It will go anywhere, and it can do anything.
My family was a poor farming family, and we lived under absolute segregation.
Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.
Yes, Mother. I can see you are flawed. You have not hidden it. That is your greatest gift to me.
I grew up in the South under segregation. So, I know what terrorism feels like - when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn't look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. I mean, that's terrorism, too.
Life is better than death, I believe, if only because it is less boring, and because it has fresh peaches in it.
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 started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.
In search of my mother's garden, I found my own.
I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.
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.
It is healthier, in any case, to write for the adults one's children will become than for the children one's 'mature' critics often are.
You bring children into the world. You love them with heart and soul.
In South Korea, they believe that when you turn 60, you've become a baby again and the rest of your life should be totally about joy and happiness, and people should leave you alone, and I just think that that's the height of intelligence.
I'm entirely interested in people, and also other creatures and beings, but especially in people, and I tend to read them by emotional field more than anything. So I have a special interest in what they're thinking and who they are and who's hiding behind those eyes and how did he get there, and what's the story, really?
I'm still living at least five parallel lives, honestly! I wonder about it. I have no idea how that happens.
Horses make a landscape look beautiful.
I believe you mother everybody, not in a cloying, hovering way, but taking care of what is around you.