Alex Haley

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

“You have to deal with the fact that your life is your life.”

“The way to succeed is never quit. That's it. But really be humble about it. ... You start out lowly and humble and you carefully try to learn an accretion of little things that help you get...”

“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.”

“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 be...”

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

“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...”

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

“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.”

“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....”

“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.”

“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 pr...”

“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 o...”

“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.”

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

“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 becau...”

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

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