Alex Haley

Sourced

• 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 born to Omoro and Binta Kinte.
  • Roots : The Saga of an American Family (1976), first lines.

• 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 difference between “being a writer” and writing. In most cases these individuals are dreaming of wealth and fame, not the long hours alone at the typewriter. “You’ve got to want to write,” I say to them, “not want to be a writer.”
  The reality is that writing is a lonely, private and poor-paying affair. For every writer kissed by fortune, there are thousands more whose longing is never requited. Even those who succeed often know long periods of neglect and poverty. I did.
  • "The Shadowland of Dreams"', published in Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work (1996) by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Maida Rogerson, Martin Rutte and Tim Clauss

• I knew I wanted to write. I had dreamed about it for years. I wasn’t going to be one of those people who die wondering, “What if?” I would keep putting my dream to the test — even though it meant living with uncertainty and fear of failure. This is the Shadowland of hope, and anyone with a dream must learn to live there. If you can't live here, get back to YOUR roots and LEARN to live here!
  • "The Shadowland of Dreams"

• In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it.
  • Variant: Find the good — and praise it.
  • This motto appears on the emblem of the Medium Endurance Cutter USCGC Alex Haley, named after the writer, as "FIND THE GOOD AND PRAISE IT". It is declared to have been his personal motto.

Unsourced

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

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

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

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

• Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is for my fellow gangstas suffering racism.

• When you clench your fist, no one can put anything in your hand, nor can your hand pick up anything.

• When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.