Literary Birthday – 9 February – Alice Walker

Happy Birthday, Alice Walker, born 9 February 1944.

Top 10 Alice Walker Quotes

1. Writing saved me from the sin and inconvenience of violence.
2. And so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower they themselves never hoped to see – or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read.
3. Fiction is such a world of freedom, it’s wonderful. If you want someone to fly, they can fly.
4. All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.
5. 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.
6. I try to teach my heart not to want nothing it can’t have.
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.
10. Any God I ever found in church, I brought in myself.

Alice Walker is an award-winning American author of novels, stories, essays, and poetry. She is best known for the critically acclaimed novel, The Color Purple, which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Walker addresses injustice, inequality, and poverty as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual.

by Amanda Patterson

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