Alice Walker Writing Quotations

I started writing as a child. But I didn't think of myself, actually writing until I was in college. And I had gone to Africa as a sophomore or something, no maybe junior and wrote a book of poems. And that was my beginning. I published that book.

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.

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.

Sometimes, reading a blog, which I do infrequently, I see that generations of Americans have been wilfully crippled, and can no longer spell or write a sentence.

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.

I write not only what I want to read...I write all the things I should have been able to read.

No song or poem will bear my mother's name. Yet so many of the stories that I write, that we all write, are my mother's stories.

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.

There's an ecstatic side to writing. It's like jazz. It just has a life.

Writing poems is my way of celebrating with the world that I have not committed suicide the evening before.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence - as it saves most writers who live in 'interesting' oppressive times and are not afflicted by personal immunity.

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.

I don't know if you actually get something out of writing poetry. I think poetry is an autonomous muse that decides to come and sit on your couch.

I've found, in my own writing, that a little hatred, keenly directed, is a useful thing.

Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.

Writing about people helps us to understand them, and understanding them helps us to accept them as part of ourselves.

If I could live as a tree, as a river, as the moon, as the sun, as a star, as the earth, as a rock, I would. ...Writing permits me to experience life as any number of strange creations.

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.