I've spent too many years carrying writing as if it were a burden that's only mine. I want to tell everybody, and young people too, that there are ma… - Maxine Hong Kingston

I feel that it's part of my work as an artist, a creator, a human being, is to integrate and to be more inclusive and to define American as large and not as exclusive. (2007)

Whatever there is when there isn't war has to be invented. What do people do in peace? Peace has barely been thought. (p306)

I think that feminist writers have been writing with power and pride, but I am suggesting that we have to invent new images and ways of power. So far the world thinks of power as violence, that power comes from a gun. We must create a new kind of drama in which there is drama, but it's nonviolent. And this has barely been thought of. (1990)