The Black woman is the most unprotected, unloved woman on earth...she is the only flower on earth...that grows unwatered.

I have much more power and protection than Salman Rushdie, because I'm an American citizen, but yes, I live in terrible fear for my life and for the lives of my children. My whole family has been threatened, my adoptive parents had to sell their house and move out of Washington, D.C. because of death threats caused by my work and activism.

The rumors about me being with Jamal Lewis, Adam Carolla and Tiki Barber are absolutely false. I've never even met Adam or Tiki Barber in person'we did phone interviews. What happens is that a lot of high-profile men saw topless photos of me.

I loved 1930's women's pictures'films by Josef Von Sternberg or William Wyler. So, I fashioned a style out of that. The integrity and ethos of what I would write, however, came from the films of Ousmane Sembene and from reading Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath and Alice Walker.

I'm not at all against white people adopting black children, because we're all human beings who need to give love and be nurtured in safety, but I do think it's better to be adopted by blacks.

I'm not a 'strong warrior queen' like people think. I spend most of my day cooking and doing things with my sons.

There are more than 100 million African women who go topless at some point in the day, each and every day, to honor both God and our ancestors. So being in a country like America where nothing is hated more than the image of the black woman, even by black people'because her womb produces the black man and makes us black'I find it of grave importance to implement African images, and especially to produce media images that acknowledge the sexual power and fertility of black women.