Toni Morrison Quotes about Writing - Page 2

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I type in one place, but I write all over the house.

I type in one place, but I write all over the house.

Toni Morrison

Writing, House, Type

Toni Morrison, Danille Kathleen Taylor-Guthrie (1994). “Conversations with Toni Morrison”, p.99, Univ. Press of Mississippi

I have a lot of respect for readers because I'm a reader. That's how I got into writing.

Toni Morrison

Writing, Reader

Source: theharvardadvocate.com

Of course I'm a black writer... I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call "literature" is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hasidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

Toni Morrison

Latin, Writing, Black

Newsweek Interview, March 30, 1981.

The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know.

Toni Morrison

School, Writing, College

Interview With Chloe Brooks, theharvardadvocate.com. April 13, 2016.

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

Sexy, Writing, Too Much Information

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

Writing, Thinking, Discovery

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 let it, and it has zero effect on the writing. It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects.

Toni Morrison

Zero, Taken, Writing

I think being an editor really helped me take other people's notes on my writing. I'd get a note like 'It's too wet' or 'The first couple chapters are good, but then the rest of the pages were so wet that they were completely illegible' or 'Did you dip this in Sprite? This smells like Sprite. Why would you dip your novel in Sprite?' And instead of pushing back, I'd listen. That's an incredibly important skill for a young writer to have.

Toni Morrison

Couple, Writing, Thinking

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

Wall, Taken, Writing

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

Writing, White, Able

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

Reading, Writing, Thinking

Interview with Christopher Bollen, www.interviewmagazine.com. May 1, 2012.