The People's Record

Today is Alice Walker’s 69th birthday! Happy birthday and thank you a thousand times! Here are a few good Alice Walker quotes:

• 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. 

• I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to. 

• All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world. 

• Ignorance, arrogance, and racism have bloomed as Superior Knowledge in all too many universities.

• Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book. If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.

• Well, capitalism is a big problem, because with capitalism you’re just going to keep buying and selling things until there’s nothing else to buy and sell, which means gobbling up the planet. 

• (On Palestine) It’s horrible to see the treatment of the people. I mean, the checkpoints are dreadful. We went through some of them. And the way the Palestinians are treated is so reminiscent of the way black people were treated in the South when I was growing up. And it’s an intolerable situation. And that our country backs this treatment by standing with Israel through thick and thin is just unbearable.

Alice Walker is an American author, poet, and activist. She has written both fiction and essays about race and gender. She is best known for the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. She’s a prominent student of Howard Zinn’s, an outspoken womanist, feminist, anti-capitalist, social-justice champion. We had the opportunity to see her speak a few months ago at the Russel Tribunal on Palestine. 

These are also all on our facebook page photostream to share there, if you like.