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"I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway."
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"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."

"Never to rush something I was creating, but instead let it come into being as if it had a soul of it's own."

"A poet is someone who never forgets they were born naked."

"For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication."

"On the whole, stories don't write themselves."

"The first time I saw a mermaid in my dream, and she looked so real...THAT.'s fishy!!"

"You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page."

"Be an artist, in whatever little faculty possible.For the Earth, without 'Art' is just 'Eh"

"What doesn't kill me provides writing material."
Explore more quotes by Toni Morrison


"I'm a Midwesterner, and everyone in Ohio is excited. I'm also a New Yorker, and a New Jerseyan, and an American, plus I'm an African-American, and a woman. I know it seems like I'm spreading like algae when I put it this way, but I'd like to think of the prize being distributed to these regions and nations and races."


"We don't need any more writers as solitary heroes. We need a heroic writer's movement: assertive, militant, pugnacious."


"She looked around for a place to be. A small place. The closet? ... It was both small and bright, and she wanted to be in a very small, very bright place. Small enough to contain her grief.Bright enough to throw into relief the dark things that cluttered her.Once inside, she sank to the tile floor next to the toilet. On her knees, her hand on the cold rim of the bathtub, she waited for something to happen inside."


"I know it's trash: just another story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it's all I have. I know I need something else. Something better. Like a story that shows how brazen women can take a good man down. I can hum to that."


"Guileless and without vanity,we were still in love with ourselves then. We felt comfortable in our own skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness."


"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, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got."
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