Of course I'm a black writer. I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American… — 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
When you first start writing-and I think it's true for a lot of beginning writers-you're scared to death that if you don't… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Writing is really a way of thinking--not just feeling but thinking about things that are disparate, unresolved, mysterious, problematic or just sweet. — 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
There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write,… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“Solitude, competitiveness and grief are the unavoidable lot of a writer only when there is no organization or network to which he… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war. It is larger than that. The peace… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“I didn't plan on either children or writing. Once I realized that writing satisfied me in some enormous way, I had to… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as something artful, waiting, just waiting and… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“A writer's life and work are not a gift to humankind; they are its necessity.” — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to. — 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
I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for hourse and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods… — 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
I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
“I am really Chloe Anthony Wofford. That's who I am. I have been writing under this other person's name. I write some… — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharrassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world's resources. — Toni Morrison Copy Share Image
Some literature is knowledge, some is just data. But if I can get a "happy" ending - which is when for the… — 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
