Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Toni Morrison
Age: 88 †
Born: 1931
Born: February 18
Died: 2019
Died: August 5
Audiobook Narrator
Librettist
Novelist
Poet
University Teacher
Writer
Lorain
Ohio
Chloe Ardelia Wofford
Chloe Anthony Wofford-Morrison
Chloe Anthony Wofford
Morrison
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison
Really
Compelled
Explain
Wouldn
Writer
Inspiration
Either
Write
Writing
Waited

More quotes by Toni Morrison

Image
The concept of physical beauty as a virtue is one of the dumbest, most pernicious and destructive ideas of the Western world, and we should have nothing to do with it.
Toni Morrison
Image
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. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.
Toni Morrison
Image
Black people are victims of an enormous amount of violence. None of those things can take place without the complicity of the people who run the schools and the city.
Toni Morrison
Image
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
Image
Pain. I seem to have an affection, a kind of sweettooth for it. Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm.
Toni Morrison
Image
He leans over and takes her hand. With the other he touches her face. ‘You your best thing, Sethe. You are.’ His holding fingers are holding hers. ‘Me? Me?
Toni Morrison
Image
Books ARE a form of political action. Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.
Toni Morrison
Image
Freedom is choosing your responsibility. It's not having no responsibilitie s it's choosing the ones you want.
Toni Morrison
Image
He wants to put his story next to hers.
Toni Morrison
Image
In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
Toni Morrison
Image
Anything I have ever learned of any consequence, I have learned from Black people. I have never been bored by any Black person, ever.
Toni Morrison
Image
You rely on a sentence to say more than the denotation and the connotation you revel in the smoke that the words send up.
Toni Morrison
Image
Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.
Toni Morrison
Image
Most of our lives are spent in little towns, little towns all throughout the country. That's where we live. And that's where the juices come from and that's where we made it, not made it in terms of success but made who we are.
Toni Morrison
Image
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
Image
Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
Toni Morrison
Image
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
Image
Life that crawled, life that slunk and crept and never closed its eyes. Life that burrowed and scurried, and life so still it was indistinguishable from the ivy stems on which it lay. Birth, life, and death - each took place on the hidden side of a leaf.
Toni Morrison
Image
You have to be willing to think the unthinkable.
Toni Morrison
Image
Evil is so seductive. It needs to grind you up and make you its slave.
Toni Morrison