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I have been sustained by cane field, the cane plantation I have.

Francois Truffaut was my godfather on 'Sugar Cane Alley.' He believed in me and in that story, and told everyone that it should be made.

Negroes could be sold - actually sold as we sell cattle, with no reference to calves or bulls or recognition of family. It was a nasty business. The white South was properly ashamed of it and continually belittled and almost denied it. But it was a stark and bitter fact.

I looked up my family tree and found out I was the sap.

The plantations in the Hilo district enjoy special advantages, for by turning some of the innumerable mountain streams into flumes, the owners can bring a great part of their cane and all their wood for fuel down to the mills without other expense than the original cost of the woodwork.

I was a farm kid from the plains of South Venezuela, from a very poor family. I grew up in a palm tree house with an earthen floor.

Reject what you don't want. Get rid of dead wood.

Sugar planting was the oil business of the eighteenth century, and Saint-Domingue was the Ancien Regime's Wild West frontier, where sons of impoverished noble families could strike it rich.

I want those young whipper-snappers to know that in days past we actually used to kill trees and make those things called books.

Everyone thinks I have a coffee plantation in Sierra Leone, but I have a cashew crop project. I wrote about a woman who owns a coffee plantation! When you are talking about a woman writer coming from a hot country, there's a complete assumption that she is writing about her own life.