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" 'Traveling with Pomegranates' is a very personal, very honest story about my relationship with my daughter and Ann's with her mother. "

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" I knew from reading about Sarah Grimke that she'd been given a handmaid to be her personal slave and that her name was Hetty. The only other fact I knew about her was that Sarah taught her to read: They conspired in a very subversive way, by locking the door and screening the keyhole. "

" I first saw 'The Dinner Party' in 2007 at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City. While perusing the Heritage Panels, which honor 999 women who have made important contributions to Western history, I came upon the names of two sisters, Sarah and Angelina Grimke. "

" I read usually in the morning, in my kitchen at breakfast - a short reading time, usually poetry. I read in bed every night. I usually get in bed pretty early with a book, and I read until I can't prop my eyes open anymore - sometimes rather late. "

" I don't go in search of ideas; I try to let them find me. "

" Due to the sweeping time frame and the voices moving back and forth, the outline for 'The Invention of Wings' was the strangest one I've ever done. I created six large, separate outlines, one for each part of the book, and hung them around my study. "

" There are so many different things out there trying to hook our attention, we writers have to be very selective and make certain that it is coming from inside out, not outside in. "

" I learned a long time ago that some people would rather die than forgive. It's a strange truth, but forgiveness is a painful and difficult process. It's not something that happens overnight. It's an evolution of the heart. "

" Unraveling external selves and coming home to our real identity is the true meaning of soul work. "

" Here is where our real selfhood is rooted, in the divine spark or seed, in the image of God imprinted on the human soul. The True Self is not our creation, but God's. It is the self we are in our depths. It is our capacity for divinity and transcendence. "

" I'm a big believer in the way ritual can put us in connection with our spirituality. "

" I want to believe that while we may sometimes read in the misguided pursuit of preserving our separation, there is a greater impulse inside us that compels us to read in search of the common heart. "

" Giving voice to marginalised characters is extremely important to me. I want to explore the pain of disenfranchisement, the social strata and boundaries we create and how to make them more permeable. "

" We have to learn not to feel guilty about letting our imagination browse around, and you know, in writing fiction particularly. But I think, in any kind of writing, we have to learn to allow ourselves to approach it in a contemplative way. "

" I've noticed that most people tend to go through life preserving their differences from others. "

" When I wrote 'The Secret Life of Bees,' I was writing about civil rights. "

" In the early 1800s, religion was often used as a way to keep slavery in place. Slaves were forced to attend the church of their owners, listen to selective dogma that kept them obedient and subservient. "

" I have an affinity for writing in the first person. I love the intimacy of being dropped inside the character. "

" A lot of time you write out of some unconscious place. I try to trust what is coming and where it wants to take me. "

" The True Self is not our creation, but God's. It is the self we are in our depths. It is our capacity for divinity and transcendence. "

" Empathy is the most mysterious transaction that the human soul can have, and it's accessible to all of us, but we have to give ourselves the opportunity to identify, to plunge ourselves in a story where we see the world from the bottom up or through another's eyes or heart. "

" I do read a poem almost every morning. Unless I'm really, really late, I have to get my poem in. "

" I had begun to write novels because of a fierce, self-serving impulse in my own heart. I had not considered the potential in a book for felt communion, the bright largesse of intimately participating in the lives of other people. "

" Writing in the voice of an American slave felt like I was biting off something very large. "

" I can't explain exactly why it lives within me for so long and passionately. But race matters to me; racial equality matters to me, as does gender. There is something about these kinds of social injustices that go to the deep of me. "

" I like to have a title before I start writing. "

" I want my words to open a portal through which the reader may leave the self, migrate to some other human sky and return 'disposed' to otherness. "

" Gradually it occurred to me that we spend a great deal of life asleep and that dreams are little narratives, little stories. I thought, 'Who's choreographing this stuff?' "

" I've always been a journal-keeper. I've always tried to write about how I'm experiencing life, and my feelings and thoughts. "

" I was a very good nurse, but I burned out after eight years or so because it wasn't what I truly wanted to do. Writing is what I belong to. "

" It's always been my hope that I would write a story that would inspire and would connect with people in a way that would touch hearts. "