If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that are closed. Everything… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Books ARE a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
I have the wonderful pleasure of finishing the book and closing it. And I don't read them later. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Most of the really good literature I've read in my life was political, meaning it was important - about something going on… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“Is there no context for our lives? No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“All narrative begins for me as listening. When I read, I listen. When I write, I listen—for silence, inflection, rhythm, rest.” — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“I think long and carefully about what novels ought to do. They should clarify the roles that have become obscured; they ought… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
All the books that were being published by African-American guys were saying 'screw whitey', or some variation of that. Not the scholars… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
If there's a book that you want to read,but hasn't been written yet,then you must write it. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
I have a lot of respect for readers because I'm a reader. That's how I got into writing. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“Criticism as a form of knowledge is capable of robbing literature not only of its own implicit and explicit ideology but of… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“The idea of a wanton woman is something I have inserted into almost all of my books. An outlaw figure who is… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it's much harder to start writing later, in middle age,… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
I'm just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it is like, or it could have been like, and… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
The idea of a wanton woman is something I have inserted into almost all of my books. An outlaw figure who is… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
I think being an editor really helped me take other people's notes on my writing. I'd get a note like 'It's too… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Perhaps that's what all human relationships boiled down to: Would you save my life? or would you take it? — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
There, in the center of that silence was not eternity but the death of time and a loneliness so profound the word itself had… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
If you can't count, they can cheat you. If you can't read, they can beat you. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“You looked at them and wondered why the were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
All she saw, down in the cellar well beneath the stoop, was a light yellow feather with a tip of green. And she had… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end.… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“Hate does that. Burns off everything but itself, so whatever your grievance is, your face looks just like your enemy's.” — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“You know how a star is supposed to twinkle? We say twinkle because that is how it looks, but when a star feels itself,… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
