We're going to have to debunk the myth that Africa is a heaven for black people -- especially black women. We've been the mule of the world there and the mule of the world here.

I feel I am a child that's lost its mother. I feel like a calf whose mother has gone off to slaughter.

My great-great-great-grandmother walked as a slave from Virginia to Eatonton, Georgia... It is in memory of this walk that I chose to keep and to embrace my "maiden" name, Walker.

You are saying, are you not, I said to Manuelito, that stories have more room in them than ideas? [...] He laughed. That is correct, Señor. It is as if ideas are made of blocks. Rigid and hard. And stories are made of a gauze that is elastic. You can almost see through it, so what is beyond is tantalizing. You can't quite make it out; and because the imagination is always moving forward, you yourself are constantly stretching. Stories are the way spirit is exercised.

Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming.

My writing is very organic. It's what I am. My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig. So I think of it as something that's very essential to my being.

In the far upper corner of my altar is a photo of Joan Crawford in her most fierce Mommy Dearest mode, just to remind me of some of the cost of everyone's hard-earned sweetness and light.