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...the City Is What They Want It To Be: Thriftless, Warm, Scary And Full Of Amiable Strangers. No Wonder They Forget Pebbly Creeks And When They Do Not Forget The Sky Completely Think Of It As A Tiny Piece Of Information About The Time Of Day Or Night.

-Toni Morrison

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...the City Is What

Toni Morrison

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...the City Is What They Want It To Be: Thriftless, Warm, Scary And Full Of Amiable Strangers. No Wonder They Forget Pebbly Creeks And When They Do Not Forget The Sky Completely Think Of It As A Tiny Piece Of Information About The Time Of Day Or Night.

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My Home Is Such A Powerfully Imaginative Place That The Space Is Almost Irrelevant. I Think The House I Live At On The Hudson Is Where I Belong Because It's The Only Place Where I Am That I Never Think About When I'm Leaving.

You Marvel At The Economy And This Choice Of Words. How Many Ways Can You Describe The Sky And The Moon? After Sylvia Plath, What Can You Say?

If I’d A Knowed More, I Would A Loved More.

Make A Difference About Something Other Than Yourselves.

If He Looked Into Her Face, He Would See Those Haunted, Loving Eyes. The Hauntedness Would Irritate Him - The Love Would Move Him To Fury. How Dare She Love Him? Hadn't She Any Sense At All? What Was He Supposed To Do About That? Return It? How? What Could His Calloused Hands Produce To Make Her Smile? What Of His Knowledge Of The World And Of Life Could Be Useful To Her? What Could His Heavy Arms And Befuddled Brain Accomplish That Would Earn Him His Own Respect, That Would In Turn Allow Him To Accept Her Love?

You Are Your Own Stories And Therefore Free To Imagine And Experience What It Means To Be Human... And Although You Don't Have Complete Control Over The Narrative - No Author Does, I Can Tell You - You Could Nevertheless Create It.

Some Literature Is Knowledge, Some Is Just Data. But If I Can Get A "happy" Ending - Which Is When For The Characters I'm Writing About, Something Happens That They Move From Wherever They Are In The Beginning To Knowledge Or Wisdom, They Know Something They Never Would Have Acknowledged Or Realized If It Hadn't Been For My Book - That For Me Is What Literature Does.

If You Surrendered To The Air, You Could Ride It.

He Said, 'always. Always.

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.

I Write The Way Women Have Babies. You Don't Know It's Going To Be Like That. If You Did, There's No Way You Would Go Through With It.

It's Bliss When You Give Up All That Stuff That Separates You From Other Human Beings. It's Hard, But You Break Down All That Stuff.

In Tar Baby, The Classic Concept Of The Individual With A Solid, Coherent Identity Is Eschewed For A Model Of Identity Which Sees The Individual As A Kaleidoscope Of Heterogeneous Impulses And Desires, Constructed From Multiple Forms Of Interaction With The World As A Play Of Difference That Cannot Be Completely Comprehended.

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.

Too Much Information

There Is No Civilization That Did Not Begin With Art, Whether It Was Drawing A Line In The Sand, Painting A Cave Or Dancing.

But Her Brain Was Not Interested In The Future. Loaded With The Past And Hungry For More, It Left Her No Room To Imagine, Let Alone Plan For, The Next Day.

She Had Been Looking All Along For A Friend, And It Took Her A While To Discover That A Lover Was Not A Comrade And Could Never Be - For A Woman. And That No One Would Ever Be That Version Of Herself Which She Sought To Reach Out To And Touch With An Ungloved Hand. There Was Only Her Own Mood And Whim, And If That Was All There Was, She Decided To Turn The Naked Hand Toward It, Discover It And Let Others Become As Intimate With Their Own Selves As She Was.

Not Knowing It Was Hard; Knowing It Was Harder

The Unflattering Reviews Are Painful For Short Periods Of Time; The Badly Written Ones Are Deeply, Deeply Insulting. That Reviewer Took No Time To Really Read The Book.

Don't Ever Think I Fell For You, Or Fell Over You. I Didn't Fall In Love, I Rose In It.

Beloved, You Are My Sister, You Are My Daughter, You Are My Face; You Are Me.

I Didn't Fall In Love, I Rose In It.

Falling In Love

Where Do You Get The Right To Decide Our Lives? I'll Tell You Where. From That Little Hog's Gut That Hangs Between Your Legs. Well, Let Me Tell You Something... You Will Need More Than That. I Don't Know Where You Will Get It Or Who Will Give It To You, But Mark My Words, You Will Need More Than That.... You Are A Sad, Pitiful, Stupid, Selfish, Hateful Man. I Hope Your Little Hog's Gut Stands You In Good Stead, And You Take Good Care Of It, Because You Don't Have Anything Else.

It Was Not Death Or Dying That Frightened Him, But The Unexpectedness Of Both. In Sorting It All Out, He Hit On The Notion That If One Day A Year Were Devoted To It, Everybody Could Get It Out Of The Way And The Rest Of The Year Would Be Safe And Free. In This Manner He Instituted National Suicide Day.

When She Awoke There Was A Melody In Her Head She Could Not Identify Or Recall Ever Hearing Before. 'perhaps I Made It Up,' She Thought. Then It Came To Her - The Name Of The Song And All Its Lyrics Just As She Had Heard It Many Times Before. She Sat On The Edge Of The Bed Thinking, 'there Aren't Any More New Songs And I Have Sung All The Ones There Are. I Have Sung Them All. I Have Sung All The Songs There Are.

Everything I've Ever Done, In The Writing World, Has Been To Expand Articulation, Rather Than To Close It.

A Sister Can Be Seen As Someone Who Is Both Ourselves And Very Much Not Ourselves - A Special Kind Of Double.

She Was The Third Beer. Not The First One, Which The Throat Receives With Almost Tearful Gratitude; Nor The Second, That Confirms And Extends The Pleasure Of The First. But The Third, The One You Drink Because It's There, Because It Can't Hurt, And Because What Difference Does It Make?

Only Her Tight, Tight Eyes Were Left. They Were Always Left...they Were Everything. Everything Was There, In Them...thrown, In This Way, Into The Binding Conviction That Only A Miracle Could Relieve Her, She Would Never Know Her Beauty. She Would See Only What There Was To See: The Eyes Of Other People.

Definitions Belong To The Definers, Not The Defined.

The Enemy Is Not Men. The Enemy Is The Concept Of Patriarchy, The Concept Of Patriarchy As The Way To Run The World Or Do Things.

What Do You Say? There Really Are No Words For That. There Really Aren't. Somebody Tries To Say, 'i'm Sorry, I'm So Sorry.' People Say That To Me. There's No Language For It. Sorry Doesn't Do It. I Think You Should Just Hug People And Mop Their Floor Or Something.

Anger Is Better. There Is A Sense Of Being In Anger. A Reality And Presence. An Awareness Of Worth. It Is A Lovely Surging.

I'm Just Trying To Look At Something Without Blinking, To See What It Is Like, Or It Could Have Been Like, And How That Had Something To Do With The Way We Live Now. Novels Are Always Inquiries For Me.

I Don't Think I Knew Any Of My Father's Friends - Male Friends - By Their Real Names. I Remember Them Only By Their Nicknames.

Me And You, We Got More Yesterday Than Anybody. We Need Some Kind Of Tomorrow.

Gimme Hate, Lord,” He Whimpered. “i’ll Take Hate Any Day. But Don’t Give Me Love. I Can’t Take No More Love, Lord. I Can’t Carry It...it’s Too Heavy. Jesus, You Know, You Know All About It. Ain’t It Heavy? Jesus? Ain’t Love Heavy?

When I Went Into The Publishing Industry, Many Women Talked About The Difficulty They Had In Persuading Their Families To Let Them Go To College. They Educated The Boys, And The Girls Had To Struggle.

Each Member Of The Family In His Own Cell Of Consciousness, Each Making His Own Patchwork Quilt Of Reality - Collecting Fragments Of Experience Here, Pieces Of Information There. From The Tiny Impressions Gleaned From One Another, They Created A Sense Of Belonging And Tried To Make Do With The Way They Found Each Other.

Language Alone Protects Us From The Scariness Of Things With No Names. Language Alone Is Meditation.

If There's A Book You Really Want To Read, But It Hasn't Been Written Yet, Then You Must Write It.

I'm Interested In The Way In Which The Past Affects The Present And I Think That If We Understand A Good Deal More About History, We Automatically Understand A Great More About Contemporary Life.

When You Gone To Get Married? You Need To Have Some Babies. It’ll Settle You.' 'i Don’t Want To Make Somebody Else. I Want To Make Myself.

And Talking About Dark! You Think Dark Is Just One Color, But It Ain't. There're Five Or Six Kinds Of Black. Some Silky, Some Woolly. Some Just Empty. Some Like Fingers. And It Don't Stay Still, It Moves And Changes From One Kind Of Black To Another. Saying Something Is Pitch Black Is Like Saying Something Is Green. What Kind Of Green? Green Like My Bottles? Green Like A Grasshopper? Green Like A Cucumber, Lettuce, Or Green Like The Sky Is Just Before It Breaks Loose To Storm? Well, Night Black Is The Same Way. May As Well Be A Rainbow.

Now What? All The Battles Feminists Won About Not Being A Sex Object, Not Being Evaluated Based On These Things, That Now Other Generations Are Wallowing In, The Extremes They Go To, To Look Sexually Attractive? It's Stunning How Things That One Fought Desperately For Are Just Being Tossed Aside With Aplomb.

I Lived In A Little Working-class Town That Had No Black Neighborhoods At All - One High School. We All Played Together. Everybody Was Either Somebody From The South Or An Immigrant From East Europe Or From Mexico. And There Was One Church, And There Were Four Elementary Schools. And We Were All, Pretty Much Until The End Of The War, Very, Very Poor.

...when The Little Boy Discovered, At Four, The Same Thing Mr. Smith Had Learned Earlier -- That Only Birds And Planes Could Fly -- He Lost All Interest In Himself.

The Race Thing Is Sort Of A Misnomer. It's Just The Human Race, Right? That's It. The Rest Of It, And Racism, Is Socially Constructed. Nobody Is Born Racist, No One. What Happens Is Other Things That Are Usually Based On Power, Money, Feeling Good About Yourself, Or Bad About Yourself, Those Things Play Into Hating Other People For Whatever Reason.

The Writing Is - I'm Free Of 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.

You Rely On A Sentence To Say More Than The Denotation And The Connotation; You Revel In The Smoke That The Words Send Up.

The Isolation, The Separateness, Is Always A Part Of Any Utopia.

He Wants To Put His Story Next To Hers.

Black People Have Always Been Used As A Buffer In This Country Between Powers To Prevent Class War.

My Daddy's Face Is A Study. Winter Moves Into It And Presides There. His Eyes Become A Cliff Of Snow Threatening To Avalanche, His Eyebrows Bend Like Black Limbs Of Leafless Trees. His Skin Takes On The Pale Cheerless Yellow Of Winter Sun; For A Jaw He Has The Edges Of A Snowbound Field Dotted With Stubble; His High Forehead Is The Frozen Sweep Of The Erie.

Racism Will Disappear When It's No Longer Profitable, And No Longer Psychologically Useful. And When That Happens, It'll Be Gone. But At The Moment, People Make A Lot Of Money Off Of It, Pro And Con.

Everywhere, Everywhere, Children Are The Scorned People Of The Earth.

American Means White, And Africanist People Struggle To Make The Term Applicable To Themselves With Ethnicity And Hyphen After Hyphen After Hyphen.

Sometimes What I Write On The Page Frightens Me, So I Feel Free When I Write, But I Don't Feel Safe.

You Your Own Best Thing, Sethe. You Are.

There Is A Certain Kind Of Peace That Is Not Merely The Absence Of War. It Is Larger Than That. The Peace I Am Thinking Of Is Not At The Mercy Of History's Rule, Nor Is It A Passive Surrender To The Status Quo. The Peace I Am Thinking Of Is The Dance Of An Open Mind When It Engages Another Equally Open One -- An Activity That Occurs Most Naturally, Most Often In The Reading/writing World We Live In. Accessible As It Is, This Particular Kind Of Peace Warrants Vigilance.

Who's Got Game? The Ant Or The Grasshopper? The Lion Or The Mouse? Poppy Or The Snake?

Misery Don't Call Ahead. That's Why You Have To Stay Awake - Otherwise It Just Walks On In Your Door.

The Vitality Of Language Lies In Its Ability To Limn The Actual, Imagined And Possible Lives Of Its Speakers, Readers, Writers.

Liberation Means You Don't Have To Be Silenced.

So This Is What Insanity Is. Not Goofy Behavior, But Watching A Sudden Change In The World You Used To Know.

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.

What's Interesting About Writing Is The Invention, The Creative Thing. Writing About Myself Is A Yawn.

Tell Us What It Is To Be A Woman So That We May Know What It Is To Be A Man. What Moves At The Margin. What It Is To Have No Home In This Place. To Be Set Adrift From The One You Knew. What It Is To Live At The Edge Of Towns That Cannot Bear Your Company.

As A Writer Reading, I Came To Realize The Obvious: The Subject Of The Dream Is The Dreamer.

Black People's Music Is In A Class By Itself And Always Has Been. There's Nothing Like It. The Reason For That Is Because It Was Not Tampered With By White People. It Was Not On The Media. It Was Not Anywhere Except Where Black People Were. And It Is One Of The Art Forms In Which Black People Decided What Is Good In It. Nobody Told Them. What Surfaced And What Floated To The Top, Were The Giants And The Best.

Black Literature Is Taught As Sociology, As Tolerance, Not As A Serious, Rigorous Art Form.

African American

Intimacy Is Extremely Important To Me And I Want It To Be Extremely Important To The Readers.

In Order To Be As Free As I Possibly Can, In My Own Imagination, I Can't Take Positions That Are Closed. Everything I've Ever Done, In The Writing World, Has Been To Expand Articulation, Rather Than To Close It, To Open Doors, Sometimes, Not Even Closing The Book -- Leaving The Endings Open For Reinterpretation, Revisitation, A Little Ambiguity.

All Paradises, All Utopias Are Designed By Who Is Not There, By The People Who Are Not Allowed In.

Our Ancestors Are An Ever Widening Circle Of Hope.

When You Stiffen, You Know That Whatever You Stiffen About Is Very Important. The Stuff Is Important, The Fear Itself Is Information.

Let Your Face Speak What's In Your Heart. When My Kids Walk In The Room My Face Says I'm Glad To See Them.

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.

Much Handled Things Are Always Soft(27).

Listening To The Doves In Alfred, Georgia, And Having Neither The Right Nor The Permission To Enjoy It Because In That Place Mist, Doves, Sunlight, Copper Dirt, Moon-everything Belonged To The Men Who Had The Guns. . . . So You Protected Yourself And Loved Small. . . . A Woman, A Child, A Brother-a Big Love Like That Would Split You Wide Open In Alfred, Georgia. . . . To Get To A Place Where You Could Love Anything You Chose-not To Need Permission For Desire-well Now, That Was Freedom

We're All Surrounded By What I Call Faux Language, Fake Language Of Commerce, Of News Media.

More Than Fear Of Loving Bears Or Birds Bigger Than Cows, I Fear Pathless Nights. How, I Wonder, Can I Find You In The Dark?

The Past Is Interesting To Me Because It's Been Dumbed Down Or Flattened Out, Or Academically Nitpicked So You Can't Get Any Life Out Of It, You Just Get Data.

Love Is Divine Only And Difficult Always. If You Think It Is Easy You Are A Fool. If You Think It Is Natural You Are Blind. It Is A Learned Application Without Reason Or Motive Except That It Is God.

I Sang "o Holy Night" In A School Choir. My Mother Came And Listened To Me And Complimented Me. So That Was The High Point. I Cannot Sing A Note.

She Left Me The Way People Leave A Hotel Room. A Hotel Room Is A Place To Be When You Are Doing Something Else. Of Itself It Is Of No Consequence To One's Major Scheme. A Hotel Room Is Convenient. But Its Convenience Is Limited To The Time You Need It While You Are In That Particular Town On That Particular Business; You Hope It Is Comfortable, But Prefer, Rather, That It Be Anoymous. It Is Not, After All, Where You Live.

Don’t Beg Anybody For Anything, Especially Love.

If You're Going To Hold Someone Down You're Going To Have To Hold On By The Other End Of The Chain. You Are Confined By Your Own Repression.

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.

Evil Is Not Interesting. What Is It, Chopping Off Someone's Head? We Used To Do That As Kids, You Know, You Tear Up Paper Dolls And Stuff. I Know Everyone's Done It In The History Of The World, But Maybe Everybody Was Dumb And They Were Just Looking For Something Interesting To Do. What's Really Interesting And Hard Is Being Good.

How Exquisitely Human Was The Wish For Permanent Happiness, And How Thin Human Imagination Became Trying To Achieve It.

At Some Point In Life The World's Beauty Becomes Enough. You Don't Need To Photograph, Paint Or Even Remember It. It Is Enough.

I Guess I'm Depressed. I Don't Know. I Can't Explain It. Part Of It Is The Irritability Of Being 84, And Part Of It Is Being Not As Physically Strong As I Once Was. And Part Of It Is My Misunderstanding, I Think, Of What's Going On In The World.

...fact Was She Knew More About Them Than She Knew About Herself, Having Never Had The Map To Discover What She Was Like. Could She Sing? (was It Nice To Hear When She Did?) Was She Pretty? Was She A Good Friend? Could She Have Been A Loving Mother? A Faithful Wife? Have I Got A Sister And Does She Favor Me? If My Mother Knew Me Would She Like Me? (140)

I Don't Work. I Keep Telling People I'm Unemployed. And I Don't Wash Dishes, And I Don't Wash Clothes, And I Don't Clean My House. Somebody Else Does That.

Hospitality Is Gold In This City; You Have To Be Clever To Figure Out How To Be Welcoming And Defensive At The Same Time. When To Love Something And When To Quit. If You Don't Know How, You Can End Up Out Of Control Or Controlled By Some Outside Thing Like That Hard Case Last Winter.

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.

Beauty Was Not Simply Something To Behold; It Was Something One Could Do.

Anything Dead Coming Back To Life Hurts.

It's A Bad Word, 'belong.' Especially When You Put It With Somebody You Love ... You Can't Own A Human Being.

The Best Art Is Political And You Ought To Be Able To Make It Unquestionably Political And Irrevocably Beautiful At The Same Time.

Long Before I Was A Success, My Parents Made Me Feel Like I Could Be One.

We Never Shape The World . . . The World Shapes Us.

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.

Passion Is Never Enough; Neither Is Skill.

I Type In One Place, But I Write All Over The House.

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.

Misery Colored By The Greens And Blues In My Mother's Voice Took Away All The Grief Out Of The Words And Left Me With A Conviction That Pain Was Not Only Endurable, It Was Sweet.

I'm Always Annoyed About Why Black People Have To Bear The Brunt Of Everybody Else's Contempt. If We Are Not Totally Understanding And Smiling, Suddenly We're Demons.

I Am In The Position Of Judging People By The Best They've Ever Done Rather Than The Worst.

Anything I Have Ever Learned Of Any Consequence, I Have Learned From Black People. I Have Never Been Bored By Any Black Person, Ever.

I Laughed But Before I Could Agree With The Hairdressers That She Was Crazy, She Said, 'what's The World For If You Can't Make It Up The Way You Want It?' " 'the Way I Want It?' " 'yeah. The Way You Want It. Don't You Want It To Be Something More Than What It Is?' " 'what'st Eh Point? I Can't Change It.' " 'that's The Point. If You Don't, It Will Change You And It'll Be Your Fault Cause You Let It. I Let It. And Messed Up My Life.' " 'mess It Up How?' " 'forgot It.' " 'forgot?' " 'forgot It Was Mine. My Life. I Just Ran Up And Down The Streets Wishing I Was Somebody Else.

Beginning 'beloved' With Numerals Rather Than Spelled Out Numbers, It Was My Intention To Give The House An Identity Separate From The Street Or Even The City.

You Looked At Me Then Like You Knew Me, And I Thought It Really Was Eden, And I Couldn't Take Your Eyes In Because I Was Loving The Hoof Marks On Your Cheeks.

Love At First Sight

Word-work Is Sublime... Because It Is Generative; It Makes Meaning That Secures Our Difference, Our Human Difference-the Way In Which We Are Like No Other Life. We Die. That May Be The Meaning Of Life. But We Do Language. That May Be The Measure Of Our Lives.

Meaning Of Life

Narrative Is Radical, Creating Us At The Very Moment It Is Being Created.

Did You Ever See The Way The Clouds Love A Mountain? They Circle All Around It; Sometimes You Can't Even See The Mountain For The Clouds. But You Know What? ... The Clouds Never Cover The Head. His Head Pokes Through, Because The Clouds Let Him; They Don't Wrap Him Up. They Let Him Keep His Head High, Free.

Most Of The Really Good Literature I've Read In My Life Was Political, Meaning It Was Important - About Something Going On In The History Of The World - Or Contemporary.

No Gasp At A Miracle That Is Truly Miraculous Because The Magic Lies In The Fact That You Knew It Was There For You All Along.

Lay My Head On The Railroad Line. Train Come Along; Pacify My Mind.

Your Life Is Already Artful-waiting, Just Waiting, For You To Make It Art.

Waiting For You

I Don't Know Whether The Bird You Are Holding Is Dead Or Alive, But What I Do Know Is That It Is In Your Hands. It Is In Your Hands.

I Wanted To Separate Color From Race. Distinguishing Color - Light, Black, In-between - As The Marker For Race Is Really An Error.

There Is Nothing Of Any Consequence In Education, In The Economy, In City Planning, In Social Policy That Does Not Concern Black People.

I Am A Writer And My Faith In The World Of Art Is Intense, But Not Irrational, Nor Naïve - Because Art Takes Us And Makes Us Take A Journey Beyond Price, Beyond Cost, Into Bearing Witness To The World As It Is And As It Should Be. Art Invites Us To Know Beauty And To Solicit It, Summon It, From Even The Most Tragic Of Circumstances.

I Would Solve A Lot Of Literary Problems Just Thinking About A Character In The Subway, Where You Can't Do Anything Anyway.

Home Is Memory, Home Is Your History, Home Is Where You Work. Some People Want To Abandon It And Become Truly Local. But The Questions Are All There.

Sunk In The Grass Of An Empty Lot On A Spring Saturday, I Split The Stems Of Milkweed And Thought About Ants And Peach Pits And Death And Where The World Went When I Closed My Eyes.

Womanists Is What Black Feminists Used To Call Themselves. Very Much So. They Were Not The Same Thing. And Also The Relationship With Men. Historically, Black Women Have Always Sheltered Their Men Because They Were Out There, And They Were The Ones That Were Most Likely To Be Killed.

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?

She Is A Friend Of Mind. She Gather Me, Man. The Pieces I Am, She Gather Them And Give Them Back To Me In All The Right Order. It's Good, You Know, When You Got A Woman Who Is A Friend Of Your Mind.

You Need Intelligence, And You Need To Look. You Need A Gaze, A Wide Gaze, Penetrating And Roving - Thats What's Useful For Art.

I Want To Discourage You From Choosing Anything Or Making Any Decision Simply Because It Is Safe. Things Of Value Seldom Are

Sweet, She Thought. He Must Think I Can't Bear To Hear Him Say It. That After All I Have Told Him And After Telling Me How Many Feet I Have, "goodbye" Would Break Me To Pieces. Ain't That Sweet. "so Long," She Murmured From The Far Side Of The Trees.

If You Can't Count, They Can Cheat You. If You Can't Read, They Can Beat You.

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. It Just Got Bigger.

It Seems To Me Everything Shakespeare Did Was Political.

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.

I'm Losing The Definition Now Of Politics. I Sort Of Don't Know What That Is Anymore. People Say Politically Correct, I Don't Know What That Means. I Know What They Think They Mean.

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.

I Always Looked Upon The Acts Of Racist Exclusion, Or Insult, As Pitiable, From The Other Person. I Never Absorbed That. I Always Thought That There Was Something Deficient About Such People.

Love Is Never Any Better Than The Lover. Wicked People Love Wickedly, Violent People Love Violently, Weak People Love Weakly, Stupid People Love Stupidly, But The Love A Free Man Is Never Safe. There Is No Gift For The Beloved. The Lover Alone Possesses His Gift Of Love. The Loved One Is Shorn, Neutralized, Frozen In The Glance Of The Lover’s Inward Eyes.

Art Invites Us To Know Beauty And To Solicit It, Summon It, From Even The Most Tragic Of Circumstances.

Bearing Witness

A Bestseller Is A Book That Non-book Buyers Buy

Freeing Yourself Was One Thing; Claiming Ownership Of That Freed Self Was Another.

How Come It Can’t Fly No Better Than A Chicken?’ Milkman Asked. Too Much Tail. All That Jewelry Weighs It Down. Like Vanity. Can’t Nobody Fly With All That [stuff]. Wanna Fly, You Got To Give Up The [stuff] That Weighs You Down.’ The Peacock Jumped Onto The Hood Of The Buick And Once More Spread Its Tail, Sending The Flashy Buick Into Oblivion.

Jealousy We Understood And Thought Natural... But Envy Was A Strange, New Feeling For Us. And All The Time We Knew That Maureen Peal Was Not The Enemy And Not Worthy Of Such Intense Hatred. The Thing To Fear Was The Thing That Made Her Beautiful, And Not Us.

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.

I Dream A Dream That Dreams Back At Me.

And Wouldn't You Know He'd Be A Singing Man.

I Tell My Students One Of The Most Important Things They Need To Know Is When They Are At Their Best, Creatively. They Need To Ask Themselves, What Does The Ideal Room Look Like? Is There Music? Is There Silence? Is There Chaos Outside Or Is There Serenity Outside? What Do I Need In Order To Release My Imagination?

Lonely Was Much Better Than Alone.

Don't Tell Us What To Believe, What To Fear. Show Us Belief's Wide Skirt And The Stitch That Unravels Fear's Caul.

At Some Point In Life The World's Beauty Becomes Enough. You Don't Need To Photograph, Paint Or Even Remember It. It Is Enough. No Record Of It Needs To Be Kept And You Don't Need Someone To Share It With Or Tell It To. When That Happens — That Letting Go — You Let Go Because You Can.

The Ability Of Writers To Imagine What Is Not The Self, To Familiarize The Strange And Mystify The Familiar, Is The Test Of Their Power.

Somebody Has To Take Responsibility For Being A Leader.

Taking Responsibility

Lonely, Ain't It? Yes, But My Lonely Is Mine. Now Your Lonely Is Somebody Else's. Made By Somebody Else And Handed To You. Ain't That Something? A Secondhand Lonely.

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.

You Have To Be Willing To Think The Unthinkable.

There Are Some Very Powerful Contributions To Knowledge In The Scientific World Or The Legal World, But Art Is Singular. That's Why Every Dictator Gets Rid Of The Artists First. They Burn The Books And Execute The Artists First. Then They Get On With Whatever Else They're Interested In. Art Might Do Something. It's Dangerous.

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

A Lot Of Black People Believe That Jews In This Country Have Become White. They Behave Like White People Rather Than Jewish People.

Do They Still Call It Infatuation? That Magic Ax That Chops Away The World In One Blow, Leaving Only The Couple Standing There Trembling? Whatever They Call It, It Leaps Over Anything, Takes The Biggest Chair, The Largest Slice, Rules The Ground Wherever It Walks, From A Mansion To A Swamp, And Its Selfishness Is Its Beauty.... People With No Imagination Feed It With Sex -- The Clown Of Love. They Don't Know The Real Kinds, The Better Kinds, Where Losses Are Cut And Everybody Benefits. It Takes A Certain Intelligence To Love Like That -- Softly, Without Props.

I Think Some Aspects Of Writing Can Be Taught. Obviously, You Can't Teach Vision Or Talent. But You Can Help With Comfort.

I Have A Lot Of Respect For Readers Because I'm A Reader. That's How I Got Into Writing.

Sweet, Crazy Conversations Full Of Half Sentences, Daydreams And Misunderstandings More Thrilling Than Understanding Could Ever Be.

Definitions Belong To The Definer, Not The Defined.

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?

Say Make Me, Remake Me. You Are Free To Do It And I Am Free To Let You Because Look, Look. Look Where Your Hands Are. Now.

If You Can Only Be Tall Because Someone Else Is On Their Knees, Then You Have A Serious Problem. And White People Have A Very, Very Serious Problem.

I Always Know The Ending; That's Where I Start.

Maybe [i Care About Language] Because I'm An Editor, Maybe Because I'm Picky, But It's All We Got, Don't Shrink It. Don't Dumb It Out, Make It Little.

Clever, But Schoolteacher Beat Him Anyway To Show Him That Definitions Belonged To The Definers - Not The Defined.

My World Did Not Shrink Because I Was A Black Female Writer. It Just Got Bigger.

Sexist Language, Racist Language, Theistic Language - All Are Typical Of The Policing Languages Of Mastery, And Cannot, Do Not, Permit New Knowledge Or Encourage The Mutual Exchange Of Ideas.

If A Negro Got Legs He Ought To Use Them. Sit Down Too Long, Somebody Will Figure Out A Way To Tie Them Up.

We Mistook Violence For Passion, Indolence For Leisure, And Thought Recklessness Was Freedom.

They Seemed To Have Taken All Of Their Smoothly Cultivated Ignorance, Their Exquisitely Learned Self-hatred, Their Elaborately Designed Hopelessness And Sucked It All Up Into A Fiery Cone Of Scorn That Had Burned For Ages In The Hollows Of Their Minds― Cooled ―and Spilled Over Lips Of Outrage, Consuming Whatever Was In Its Path.

I Know The World Is Bruised And Bleeding, And Though It Is Important Not To Ignore Its Pain, It Is Also Critical To Refuse To Succumb To Its Malevolence. Like Failure, Chaos Contains Information That Can Lead To Knowledge - Even Wisdom. Like Art.

In Becoming An American, From Europe, What One Has In Common With That Other Immigrant Is Contempt For Me-it's Nothing Else But Color.

Listen Up. Let Me Tell You Something. A Man Ain’t A Goddamn Ax. Chopping, Hacking, Busting Every Goddamn Minute Of The Day. Things Get To Him. Things He Can’t Chop Down Because They’re Inside.

There Is An Incredible Amount Of Magic And Feistiness In Black Men That Nobody Has Been Able To Wipe Out. But Everybody Has Tried.

It's Been Mentioned Or Suggested That Paradise Will Not Be Well Studied, Because It's About This Unimportant Intellectual Topic, Which Is Religion.

All She Saw, Down In The Cellar Well Beneath The Stoop, Was A Light Yellow Feather With A Tip Of Green. And She Had Never Named Him. Had Called Him "my Parrot" All These Years. "my Parrot." "love You. "love You." Did The Dogs Get Him? Or Did He Get The Message - That She Said, "my Parrot" And He Said, "love You," And She Had Never Said It Back Or Even Taken The Trouble To Name Him - And Manage Somehow To Fly Away On Wings That Had Not Soared For Six Years.

Perhaps That's What All Human Relationships Boiled Down To: Would You Save My Life? Or Would You Take It?

Human Relations

Human Relationships

Like Any Artist Without An Art Form, She Became Dangerous.

In My Mother's Church, Everybody Read The Bible And It Was Mostly About Music. My Mother Had The Most Beautiful Voice I Have Ever Heard In My Life. She Could Sing Anything - Classical, Jazz, Blues, Opera. And People Came From Long Distances To That Little Church She Went To - African Methodist Episcopal, The Ame Church She Belonged To - Just Hear Her.

Two Parents Can't Raise A Child Any More Than One. You Need A Whole Community - Everybody - To Raise A Child. And The Little Nuclear Family Is A Paradigm That Just Doesn't Work. It Doesn't Work For White People Or For Black People. Why Are We Hanging Onto It, I Don't Know. It Isolates People Into Little Units - People Need A Larger Unit.

For A Long Time I Was Convinced That The Conflict Between Jewish People And Black People In This Country Was A Media Event.

Please Don't Settle For Happiness. It's Not Good Enough. Of Course You Deserve It, But If That's All You Have In Mind - Happiness - I Want To Suggest To You That Personal Success Devoid Of Meaningfulness, Free Of A Steady Commitment To Social Justice - That's More Than A Barren Life. It's A Trivial One.

Not Good Enough

I Don't Think Anybody Cares About Unwed Mothers Unless They're Black Or Poor. The Question Is Not Morality, The Question Is Money. That's What We're Upset About.

Every Now And Then She Looked Around For Tangible Evidence Of His Having Ever Been There. Where Were The Butterflies? The Blueberries? The Whistling Reed? She Could Find Nothing, For He Had Left Nothing But His Stunning Absence.

I Had Only One Desire: To Dismember It. To See Of What It Was Made, To Discover The Dearness, To Find The Beauty, The Desirability That Had Escaped Me, But Apparently Only Me.

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.

...black Women Write Differently From White Women. This Is The Most Marked Difference Of All Those Combinations Of Black And White, Male And Female. It's Not So Much That Women Write Differently From Men, But That Black Women Write Differently From White Women. Black Men Don't Write Very Differently From White Men.

Black And White

I Always Start Out With An Idea, Even A Boring Idea, That Becomes A Question I Don't Have Answers To.

But To Find Out The Truth About How Dreams Die, One Should Never Take The Word Of The Dreamer.

In Times Of Dread, Artists Must Never Choose To Remain Silent.

My Children Are Delightful People, Whom I Would Love Even If They Weren't My Children.

We Die. That May Be The Meaning Of Life. But We Do Language. That May Be The Measure Of Our Lives.

Meaning Of Life

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