Writing From Toni Morrison Quotes & Sayings

I loved 1930's women's pictures'films by Josef Von Sternberg or William Wyler. So, I fashioned a style out of that. The integrity and ethos of what I would write, however, came from the films of Ousmane Sembene and from reading Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath and Alice Walker. — Kola Boof

One has to work very carefully with what is in between the words. What is not said. Which is measure, which is rhythm and so on. So, it is what you don't write that frequently gives what you do write its power. — Toni Morrison

I tell my students there is such a thing as 'writer's block,' and they should respect it. You shouldn't write through it. It's blocked because it ought to be blocked, because you haven't got it right now. — Toni Morrison

I get angry about things, then go on and work. — Toni Morrison

I said that if she won I would tell all of you something I learned about her this summer. Jackie Woodson is allergic to watermelon. Just let that sink in your minds. I said, 'You have to put that in a book.' And she said, 'You put that in a book.' And I said, 'I'm only writing a book about a black girl who's allergic to watermelon if you, Cornel West, Toni Morrison and Barack Obama say, 'This guy's OK. — Lemony Snicket

The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing.It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects. — Toni Morrison

If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. — Toni Morrison

Usually I try to be there by six. Everything has been taken off the walls so that there's nothing to arrest my sight. On the bed I have Roget's Thesaurus, a dictionary, a Bible, and a deck of playing cards. — Toni Morrison

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 wet' or 'The first couple chapters are good, but then the rest of the pages were so wet that they were completely illegible' or 'Did you dip this in Sprite? This smells like Sprite. Why would you dip your novel in Sprite?' And instead of pushing back, I'd listen. That's an incredibly important skill for a young writer to have. — Toni Morrison

Anger ... it's a paralyzing emotion ... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling - I don't think it's any of that - it's helpless ... it's absence of control - and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers ... and anger doesn't provide any of that - I have no use for it whatsoever.
[Interview with CBS radio host Don Swaim, September 15, 1987.] — Toni Morrison

The habit of getting up early, which I had formed when the children were young, now became my choice. I am not very bright or very witty or very inventive after the sun goes down. — Toni Morrison

When I read Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisneros as a freshman at Rutgers, it all clicked - that writing was all I wanted to do. It became my calling. — Junot Diaz

There are some writers who sweep us along so strongly in their current of energy--Normal mailer, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, William F. Buckley, Jr., Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers--that we assume that when they go to work the words just flow. Nobody thinks of the effort they made every morning to turn on the switch. You also have to turn on the switch. Nobody is going to do it for you. — William Zinsser

When I write, I don't translate for white readers ... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me. — Toni Morrison

Make up a story ... For our sake and yours forget your name in the street; tell us what the world has been to you in the dark places and in the light. Don't tell us what to believe, what to fear. Show us belief's wide skirt and the stitch that unravels fear's caul. — Toni Morrison

What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn. — Toni Morrison

I don't wait to be struck by lightning and I don't need certain slants of light in order to be able to write. — Toni Morrison

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

Responding to Wright's critique, Hurston claimed that she had wanted at long last to write a black novel, and "not a treatise on sociology." It is this urge that resonates in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and Beloved, and in Walker's depiction of Hurston as our prime symbol of "racial health - a sense of black people as complete, complex, undiminished human beings, a sense that is lacking in so much black writing and literature." In a tradition in which male authors have ardently denied black literary paternity, this is a major development, one that heralds the refinement of our notion of tradition: Zora and her daughters are a tradition-within-the-tradition, a black woman's voice. — Zora Neale Hurston

Black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white, male and female. It's not so much that women write differently from men, but that black women write differently from white women. Black men don't write very differently from white men. — Toni Morrison

When Toni Morrison said 'write the book you want to read,' she didn't mean everybody. — Fran Lebowitz

Sex is difficult to write about because it's just not sexy enough. The only way to write about it is not to write much. Let the reader bring his own sexuality into the text. A writer I usually admire has written about sex in the most off-putting way. There is just too much information. — Toni Morrison

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

I type in one place, but I write all over the house. — Toni Morrison

I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to. — Toni Morrison

There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war. It is larger than that. The peace I am thinking of is not at the mercy of history's rule, nor is it a passive surrender to the status quo. The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one
an activity that occurs most naturally, most often in the reading/writing world we live in. Accessible as it is, this particular kind of peace warrants vigilance. — Toni Morrison

I can't explain inspiration. A writer is either compelled to write or not. And if I waited for inspiration I wouldn't really be a writer. — Toni Morrison

I did not want to write this book as a way of explaining the humanity of Vietnamese. Toni Morrison says in Beloved that to have to explain yourself to white people distorts you because you start from a position of assuming your inhumanity or lack of humanity in other people's eyes. Rather than writing a book that tries to affirm humanity, which is typically the position that minority writers are put into, the book starts from the assumption that we are human, and then goes on to prove that we're also inhuman at the same time. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

I didn't plan on either children or writing. Once I realized that writing satisfied me in some enormous way, I had to make adjustments. The writing was always marginal in terms of time when the children were small. But it was major in terms of my head. I always thought that women could do a lot of things. All the women I knew did nine or ten things at one time. I always understood that women worked, they went to church, they managed their houses, they managed somebody else's houses, they raised their children, they raised somebody else's children, they taught. I wouldn't say it's not hard, but why wouldn't it be? All important things are hard. — Toni Morrison

I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma ... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important? — Toni Morrison

If there's a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.- Toni Morrison — Sean Liburd

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic ... Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage. — Toni Morrison

There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal. — Toni Morrison

But the important thing is that I don't do anything else. I avoid social life normally associated with publishing. I don't go to the cocktail parties, I don't give or go to dinner parties. I need that time in the evening because I can do a tremendous amount of work then. And I can concentrate. When I sit down to write I never brood. I have so many other things to do, with my children and teaching, that I can't afford it ... — Toni Morrison

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, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family. — Toni Morrison

I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it. — Mohsin Hamid

Toni Morrison is challenged regularly because she is a black author who writes about the real world. She speaks with so much knowledge about black issues she can't be accused of creating these (issues). People find these issues threatening. — Judith Krug

I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say 'people,' that's what I mean. — Toni Morrison

The writing is - I'm free from pain. It's the place where I live; it's where I have control; it's where nobody tells me what to do; it's where my imagination is fecund and I am really at my best. Nothing matters more in the world or in my body or anywhere when I'm writing. — Toni Morrison

Write at the edges of the day. — Toni Morrison

Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it. — Toni Morrison

People say to write about what you know. I'm here to tell you, no one wants to read that, cos you don't know anything. So write about something you don't know. And don't be scared, ever. — Toni Morrison