Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you.

My fondest hope is that ‘Roots’ may start black, white, brown, red, yellow people digging back for their own roots. Man, that would make me feel 90 feet tall.

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 love the less successful one any less.

In every conceivable manner, the family is link to our past, bridge to our future.

Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.

Tying the little folks with the older folks is a great and powerful tool to preserve and to protect the family and the individual.

Find the good, and praise it.

The first time he had taken the massa to one of these “high-falutin’ to-dos,” as Bell called them, Kunta had been all but overwhelmed by conflicting emotions: awe, indignation, envy, contempt, fascination, revulsion—but most of...

I later heard somewhere, or read, that Malcolm X telephoned an apology to the reporter. But this was the kind of evidence which caused many close observers of the Malcolm X phenomenon to declare in...

Anytime you see a turtle up on top of a fence post, you know he had some help.

Racism is taught in our society, it is not automatic. It is learned behavior toward persons with dissimilar physical characteristics.

Nobody can do for little children what grandparents do. Grandparents sort of sprinkle stardust over the lives of little children.