Toni Morrison

If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.

I'm writing for black people, in the same way that Tolstoy was writing for Russians, not for a little white island in the Caribbean.

The function of freedom is to free someone else.

You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

Certain things are not to be looked at.

Freeing yourself was one thing, claiming ownership of that freed self was another.

Racism is a construct, a social construct, and it has a motive. It has a profit. It has an agenda.

I can't say 'I'm writing a book' unless I have a topic, a subject, a theme, and characters who are struggling with that theme.

Love is never any better than the lover.

Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

White people have a very, very serious problem, and they should start thinking about what they are doing and why they are doing it.

Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is being created.

The world is not a reader. It is a text.

I tell my students, 'When you get these jobs, you have the privilege of not being a slave.'

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.

I never asked to be a spokesperson. I just write books.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

She was a bold, if not a beautiful, woman.

There is no place you can go and get away from yourself.