Top 33 Toni Morrison Writing Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. I am really Chloe Anthony Wofford. That's who I am. I have been writing under this other person's name. I write some things now as Chloe Wofford, private things. I regret having called myself Toni Morrison when I published my first novel, The Bluest Eye.
Toni Morrison
#5. 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
#6. If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
Toni Morrison
#7. 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
#8. I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that.
Toni Morrison
#9. 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
#10. When Toni Morrison said 'write the book you want to read,' she didn't mean everybody.
Fran Lebowitz
#11. 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
#12. I type in one place, but I write all over the house.
Toni Morrison
#13. 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
#14. I get angry about things, then go on and work.
Toni Morrison
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.
Toni Morrison
#19. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.
Toni Morrison
#20. I always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question I don't have answers to.
Toni Morrison
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. There's a difference between writing for a living and writing for
life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises ...
If you write for life, you'll work hard; you'll do what's honest,
not what pays
Toni Morrison
#26. 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
#27. 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
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.
Toni Morrison
#32. 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
#33. 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
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