Alex Haley Quotes

38 quotes in 663 categories

• When you clench your fist, no one can put anything in your hand.
• Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.
• Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues - which takes years.
• Every death is like the burning of a library.
• When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.
• In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it.
• I look at my books the way parents look at their children. The fact that one becomes more successful than the others doesn't make me…
• Tying the little folks with the older folks is a great and powerful tool to preserve and to protect the family and the individual.
• You don't spend twenty years of your life in the service and not have a warm, nostalgic feeling left in you. It's a small service,…
• I wasn't going to be one of those people who died wondering what if? I would keep putting my dreams to the test - even…
• Many a young person tells me he wants to be a writer. I always encourage such people, but I also explain that there's a big…
• I think one of the most fascinating things you can do after you learn about your own people is to study something about the history…
• Early in the spring of 1750, in the village of Juffure, four days upriver from the coast of The Gambia, West Africa, a manchild was…
• You can never enslave somebody who knows who he is.
• In the bush, trust no one you don't know.
• Never completely encircle your enemy. Leave him some escape, for he will fight even more desperately if trapped.
• It's an hour during the week where you can just slow down.
• I acknowledge immense debt to the griots [tribal poets] of Africa - where today it is rightly said that when a griot dies, it is…
• If you need to know history, the real story of those before you, then you should go to the library and read newspaper clippings of…
• History is written by winners.

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