Maxine Hong Kingston on creativity and culture:

A good strong imagination doesn't go off into some wild fantasy of nowhere. It goes to the truth. It also tells a lot about the talk story tradition, thousands of years of people who passed on history, genealogy, skills by speaking it. And they managed to take this across the ocean and to give it to me.

I want to figure out a way for those heroes not to use the means of the gun. We know lots of ways of solving, bringing peace with guns and with stockpiles of weapons. And those means we've figured out. I think it's the task of the writer, the thinker, the visionary to find more means, like the ones that Martin Luther King and Ghandi figured out. They were such pioneers, and yet they only figured out a few.