Quotes by Toni Morrison

About Toni Morrison:

Toni Morrison is an American novelist, editor, and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon and Beloved. She was also commissioned to write the libretto for a new opera, Margaret Garner, first performed in 2005. She won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for Beloved and the Nobel Prize in 1993. On May 29, 2012, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Morrison serves as Professor Emeritus at Princeton University.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

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 ...

Toni Morrison

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 hea...

Toni Morrison

For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.

Toni Morrison

This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, an...

Toni Morrison

All of that art-for-art’s-sake stuff is BS,” she declares. “What are these people talking about? Are you really telling me that Shakespeare and Aeschylus weren’t writing about kings? All good art is political! There is none that isn’t. And ...

Toni Morrison

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...

Toni Morrison

I don't believe any real artists have ever been non-political. They may have been insensitive to this particular plight or insensitive to that, but they were political, because that's what an artist is―a politician.

Toni Morrison

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, .

Toni Morrison

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 ...

Toni Morrison

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

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

I can't tell you why I was in love with her. People didn't require that much as they do now. Folks were expected to be civilized to one another, honest, and - and clear. You relied on people being what they said they were, because there was no other ...

Toni Morrison

What I think the political correctness debate is really about is the power to be able to define. The definers want the power to name. And the defined are now taking that power away from them.

Toni Morrison

It's gonna hurt, now," said Amy. "anything dead coming back to life hurts.

Toni Morrison

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in. [Conversation with Elizabeth Farnsworth, , March 9, 1998]

Toni Morrison

What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not?

Toni Morrison

I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got.

Toni Morrison

I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer...

Toni Morrison

I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. T...

Toni Morrison

We were two throats and one eye and we had no price.

Toni Morrison

Author Bio

  • NameToni Morrison
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • BornFebruary 18, 1931
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist; Librettist
  • AwardsNobel Prize In Literature; Knight Of The Legion Of Honour; Commandeur Des Arts Et Des Lettres?; Norman Mailer Prize; National Humanities Medal; The Nichols-Chancellor's Medal