What’s the world for you if you can’t make it up the way you want it?
TONI MORRISONThere’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.
More Toni Morrison Quotes
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She learned the intricacy of loneliness: the horror of color, the roar of soundlessness and the menace of familiar objects lying still.
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What a woman. What a life.
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I type in one place, but I write all over the house.
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For me the history of the place of black people in this country is so varied, complex and beautiful. And impactful.
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To get to a place where you could love anything you chose – not to need permission for desire – well now that was freedom.
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Liberation means you don’t have to be silenced.
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You are your best thing.
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Being able to laugh got me through.
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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.
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There is an incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried.
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I didn’t want to speak for black people. I wanted to speak to and to be among. It’s us.
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Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe.
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Literature, it seems to me, is wisdom.
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I’ve spent my entire writing life trying to make sure that the white gaze was not the dominant one in any of my books.
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If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.
TONI MORRISON