Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.

Israel is guilty of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people, both inside Israel and also in the Occupied Territories.

I'm the most stubborn person I know.

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...

I think there is a sense of being forced at this time to look at America's really large shadow and that's not all that bad.

I see children, all children, as humanity's most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left.

I realized I was a country person - I'm just not used to small spaces.

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.

I was distressed that after 9/11, when the United States was attacked by terrorists, the United States' response was to attack Afghanistan, where some of the terrorists had been.

I'm not convinced that women have the education or the sense of their own history enough or that they understand the cruelty of which men are capable and the delight that many...

It is justice and respect that I want the world to dust off and put - without delay, and with tenderness - back on the head of the Palestinian child. It will be imperfect justice...

My work is about my life, and what I want to do with it.

Part of what confuses people in times of upheaval is that you're getting so many different points of view and directions and so and so, how to do this and do that. And a lot of...

People tend to think that life really does progress for everyone eventually, that people progress, but actually only some people progress. The rest of the people don't.

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.

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.

In my work and in myself I reflect black people, women and men, as I reflect others. One day even the most self-protective ones will look into the mirror I provide and not be...

I'm sure we, the American people, are the butt of jokes by those in power.

I'm for women choosing whatever they want to do but they have to really know what they are doing.

I think that wealthy white people would like to have a country that resembles the Fifties, when all the minorities were tucked away in ghettos and paid in very low wages but on...