Toni Morrison on writing:

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. 

Toni Morrison, on life & art:

Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.
- Toni Morrison.

Toni Morrison, on writing:

 

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.

Toni Morrison, on books, reading and writing:

If there's a book you really want to read,

but it hasn't been written yet,

then you must write it.

- Toni Morrison.

Born on this day – Toni Morrison:

Writer

February 18, 1931 – August 5, 2019

Credits:

A Mercy (2008); bell hooks: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations (2023); Beloved (1987); Birth of a Nation'hood (1997); Black Satin (2004); Burn This Book (2009); Christopher Hitchens (2017); Conversations with Toni Morrison (1994); David Bowie (2016); Desdemona (2012); Ernest Hemingway (2015); Fred Rogers: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations (2021); Frida Kahlo: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations (2020); Gabriel García Márquez (2015); Go the Way Your Blood Beats (1996); God Help the Child (2014); Goodness and the Literary Imagination (2019); Graham Greene: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations (2019); Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (2013); Home (2011); Hunter S. Thompson (2018); Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir (1987); J. D. Salinger (2016); James Baldwin: The Last Interview: and other Conversations (2014); Jane Jacobs (2016); Janet Malcolm: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations (2022); Jazz (1992); John Lewis: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (2021); Johnny Cash: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations (2021); Jorge Luis Borges (2012); Julia Child: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (2018); Kathy Acker: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations (2018); Kurt Cobain: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations (2022); Kurt Vonnegut (2011); Learning to Live Finally (2005); Lessons of the Masters (2003); Little Cloud and Lady Wind (2010); Lou Reed (2015); Love (2003); Martin Luther King, Jr.: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations (2017); Memoirs (1999); Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations (2019); Nora Ephron: The Last Interview (2015); Octavia E. Butler: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations (2023); Oliver Sacks (2016); On Girlhood: 15 Stories from the Well-Read Black Girl Library (2021); Paradise (1997); Peeny Butter Fudge (2009); Philip K. Dick (2015); Playing in the Dark (1992); Please, Louise (2013); Race (2017); Race-Ing Justice, En-Gendering Power (1992); Ray Bradbury: The Last Interview (2014); Recitatif (1983); Remember (2004); Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations (2009); Shirley Chisholm: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations (2021); Sincerity and Authenticity (1972); Six Walks in the Fictional Woods (1994); Song of Solomon (1977); Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (1941); Sula (1973); Tar Baby (1981); The Big Box (1999); The Bluest Eye (1970); The Book of Mean People (2002); The Dancing Mind (1996); The Good Parts (2000); The Measure of Our Lives (2019); The Mirror Or The Glass? (2005); The Nobel Lecture In Literature, 1993 (1994); The Origin of Others (2016); The Romantic Generation (1995); The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance (1973); The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays, Speeches, and Meditations (2019); The Tortoise or the Hare (2010); The Writer Before the Page: From The Source of Self-Regard (2019); To Die for the People (2009); Toni Morrison: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations (2020); Ursula K. Le Guin: The Last Interview and Other Conversations (2019); What Moves at the Margin (2008); Who's Got Game? Poppy or the Snake? (2004); Who's Got Game? The Ant or the Grasshopper? (2003); Who's Got Game? The Lion or the Mouse? (2003); Who's Got Game? Three Fables (2003); Women of Color Pray (2012); Writers: Their Lives and Works (2018).

Toni Morrison, on writing:

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self,

to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar,

is the test of their power.

- Toni Morrison.