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The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.

She's lonely and wounded and very vulnerable and it really is a story about people at the heart of it all.

My mother, as a girl, had remembered this woman from Maine, someone who was part of the extended family somehow, and I recall her talking about this great, risk-taking woman. There are the most amazing, heroic stories in everybody's lives.

We are all the heroes and heroines of our own lives. Our love stories are amazingly romantic; our losses and betrayals and disappointments are gigantic in our own minds.

When Nandita expressed a desire to write about me, I couldn't stop her because she's my wife, but she has forgotten who she is.

Since I was a little girl, I have witnessed the strength and courage that energized my mother, who left every sorrow and pain in the past, who would work unyieldingly to obtain her goals, who was the great warrior from whom I learned all the values that are today fundamental pillars of my every day.

Rosa Parks inspired many. She will not be forgotten.

Whether you want to entertain or to provoke, to break hearts or reassure them, what you bring to your writing must consist of your longings and disappointments.

What she did was to open our eyes to details of country life such as teaching us names of wild flowers and getting us to draw and paint and learn poetry.

I decided that if I want to write about a female hero in the 1920s, I'm going to have to give her all the advantages I can because she has serious disadvantages in being a woman. I wasn't going to have her cowed or overawed by class, so she had to be titled.