ALEX HALEY

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

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.

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.

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

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

In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it.

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

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.

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

I stand by 'Roots' as symbol of the fate of my people.

Most of the people I've met who are black in other countries look up to the blacks in this country. Though they may talk differently, they are anxious to partake of this country simply because things in their country are not physically on par with what they are here.

To the best of my knowledge and of my effort, every lineage statement within 'Roots' is from either my African or American families' carefully preserved oral history, much of which I have been able conventionally to corroborate with documents.

The money I have made and will be making means nothing to me compared to the fact that about half of the black people I meet - ranging from the most sophisticated to the least sophisticated - say to me, 'I'm proud of you.' I feel strongly about always earning that and never letting black people down.

If you think about it, there's not a religious group, there's not a nationalistic group, there's not a tribe, there is no grouping of people to my knowledge, of any consequence, who have not, at one or another time, been the object of hatred, racism, or who has not had people against them just because they were them.

I know Juffure was a British trading post and my portrait of the village bears no resemblance to the way it was. But the portrait I gave was true of nearly all the other villages in Gambia. I, we, need a place called Eden. My people need Pilgrim's Rock.

If you're blessed to do something like 'Roots'... you find yourself immersed. You're asked to do this, to do that - all for admirable causes. But you're just swamped.

I think from what I personally know, I am really quite proud of most of the people I know who have 'made it,' who do things to help people.

A word, for example, that is negative, pejorative, and has caused more pain and suffering is 'illegitimate.' But every person has a mother and father. It is another way we let society hurt others.

He was always - I like to say of Malcolm - he was just simply electrical. Everything he did almost was dramatic, and it wasn't that he was trying to be: it was just the nature of him.

My own perception of Malcolm was one of something that bordered on fascination because I was looking at him and reacting to him as a subject.

If somebody comes up and says something good about you, that is never taken as an adhesive thing like something negative about you.

We don't know: some little black boy or girl growing up in the inner city might grow up and cure cancer for all of us - if we let them do it.

Two years passed, and I had no second book to follow 'Roots.' Four years passed, six years. When a decade had passed without me having another book to follow 'Roots,' I was having serious private frustrations with myself.

The problem is to find the time to write. That's why I go to sea. I couldn't be happier than when at sea.