• From The Bluest Eye (1970).
• From “Race Relations; On to Disneyland and Real Unreality” (1973).
• From “Behind the Making of The Black Book” (1974).
• From “Intimate Things in Place: A Conversation with Toni Morrison” (1976).
• From “I Will Always Be a Writer” (1976).
• From “Toni Morrison’s Saga Is Praised in All the Proper Places” (1977).
• From “Cinderella’s Stepsisters” (1979).
• From “Toni Morrison’s Black Magic” (1981).
• From “A Conversation with Toni Morrison” (1981).
• From “An Interview with Toni Morrison, Hessian Radio Network, Frankfurt, West Germany” (1983).
• From “An Interview with Toni Morrison” (1983).
• From “Toni Morrison” (1983).
• From “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” (1984).
• From “A Conversation: Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison” (1985).
• From “An Interview with Toni Morrison” (1985).
• From “An Interview with Toni Morrison” (1986).
• From “Author Toni Morrison Discusses Her Latest Novel Beloved” (1987).
• From “In the Realm of Responsibility: A Conversation with Toni Morrison”(1987).
• From “Toni Morrison’s Work Needs No Lobbying” (1988).
• From “The Pain of Being Black” (1989).
• From “An Inspired Life: Toni Morrison Writes and a Generation Listens” (1992).
• From Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992).
• From Jazz (1992).
• From “Toni Morrison: The Art of Fiction CXXXIV” (1993).
• From Lecture and Speech of Acceptance, upon the Award of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1994).
• From “Chloe Wofford Talks About Toni Morrison” (1994).
• From “Great Minds Come Together in Atlanta” (1995).
• From The Dancing Mind (1996).
• From “The Salon Interview: Toni Morrison” (1998).
• From Paradise (1998).
• From “Toni Morrison AOL Live Chat” (2000).
• From “The Dead of September 11” (2001).
• NOTES

Toni Morrison values her privacy. She does not care to discuss her personal life. She insists that it is not interesting. Her comments on writing in the many interviews she has given over the years and her essays on literature reveal much about the extent to which her lived experiences help to shape her fiction.

From The Bluest Eye (1970).

My mother’s fussing soliloquies always irritated and depressed us. They were interminable, insulting, and although indirect (Mama never named anybody—just talked about folks and some people), extremely painful in their thrust. She would go on like that for hours, connecting one offense to another until all of the things that chagrined her were spewed out. Then, having told everybody and everything off, she would burst into song and sing the rest of the day. But it was such a long time before the singing part came.¹

From “Race Relations; On to Disneyland and Real Unreality” (1973).

I have to go to Disneyland. For years when my children begged me to take them, I gave them a nice round of “uh huh” designed to shut them up. I couldn’t explain to them that I saw Snow White and the Cowardly Lion and the alligators every morning. That there were no fantasies in California that I had not seen in New York.

It was a mistake. This year especially I have regretted it. For this year fantasy itself lost its genuineness. The normal lines of communication between sham and reality had broken down. The world’s best known black writer discussed his relations with his publisher in the same terms slaves used to describe their owners. Two of the most liberated and intelligent women I know talked about their abortions with the same verbs, the same adjectives, the same narcissism, the same fond recollection with which women of another generation discussed childbirth. I spent months doing (with 24 times the money) what my father did in 1935: anguish about how to put meat on the table. I smelled famine in the world’s richest country, and was told by the privileged to tighten my belt. A 10-year-old French mulatto responded to being called a dirty black with “I’m not black, I’m Parisian.” Apparently Fanon had never lived; I hallucinated him.

Nine years after a white boy spit at my son and accused him of being black, this year a white boy accused him of not being black. He was confused. “Well,” I said, “white people complain a lot. They use blackness for lots of things—for whatever is going on in the world. Please don’t let them define you. And please don’t try to please them. Whatever they want you to be, chances are they want it for themselves, not for you.”

He didn’t know what I was talking about and, like not going to Disneyland, I couldn’t explain. But I’m going. The reason I had refused to go is no longer valid.

Too tired? I’ve never been more exhausted in my life. Not just the weight of old anger, but an inability to contain the new. Mine is a tiredness of perception, of strafed ganglia. Anchors float. Bread won’t mold. Children’s brains splatter on the walls of “very good” homes.

So I want to go to Disneyland where the deceptions are genuine, where I can see constant unreality, steady illusion. 1 want to see the real Snow White dancing among the dirty old men. I want to see the plastic teeth of real alligators snapping at the hull of my boat. I want to watch real cowboy murderers kill the same number of people at the same time every day.²

From “Behind the Making of The Black Book” (1974).

Being older than a lot of people, I remember when soul food was called supper, and when the complete failure in the neighborhood was not the drunk who sat in the alley, but the pimp who sat on the bannister. Society, or whoever, may have driven them both to extremes, but the drunk had responded with awesome (and manly) feats of consumption, endurance and imagination, while the pimp had surrendered to a view of the flesh-as-property identical to the one the old slave-master had. Both the drunk and the pimp lacked dignity, but one had forgotten his history.

It was a curious time, the Thirties, Forties and on, made more curious to me now because it seems to have no relation to the new Black history being propounded in the streets, in the classrooms and in the gatherings of Black people in this country. It is strongly hinted that we have come ’up’ from ignorance; that aside from Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois, we were illiterate worshipers of white people; a nonreading people who understood only the spoken word and learned the little we did by molecular displacement. A people who didn’t know enough, hate enough or love enough. The assumption about our reading habits is based on the fact that few Black people had more than a few years of primary schooling and that reading at the sixth-grade level is not reading at all. (In spite of the fact that the New York Times is written at the sixth grade level—most other newspapers at the fourth grade—and that going to school for Black people had nothing to do with the ability to read.) My grandfather went to school for one day: to tell the teacher he would not be back. Yet all his adult life he read greedily, as did his uneducated friends.³

From “Intimate Things in Place: A Conversation with Toni Morrison” (1976).

Though I live in New York, I don’t relate easily to very, very large cities, because I have never lived in a huge city except this one. My tendency is to focus on neighborhoods and communities. And the community, the black community—I don’t like to use that term because it came to mean something much different in the sixties and seventies, as though we had to forge one—but it had seemed to me that it was always there, only we called it the “neighborhood.” And there was this life-giving, very, very strong sustenance that people got from the neighborhood. One lives, really, not so much in your house as you do outside of it, within the “compounds,” within the village, or whatever it is. And legal responsibilities, all the responsibilities that agencies now have, were the responsibilities of the neighborhood. So that people were taken care of, or locked up or whatever. If they were sick, other people took care of them; if they needed something to eat, other people took care of them; if they were old, other people took care of them; if they were mad, other people provided a small space for them, or related to their madness or tried to find out the limits of their madness.

They also meddled in your lives a lot. They felt that you belonged to them. And every woman on the street could raise everybody’s child, and tell you exactly what to do and you felt that connection with those people and they felt it with you. And when they punished us or hollered at us, it was, at the time, we thought, so inhibiting and so cruel, and it’s only much later that you realized that they were interested in you. Interested in you-they cared about your behavior.⁴

From “I Will Always Be a Writer” (1976).

When I describe the editor’s job, it will sound simple but very packed. An editor’s functions vary from house to house. One thing that we all have in common is editing manuscripts and seeking work we’d like to buy. I look for manuscripts from agents and/or people. Then I talk to the writer or the agent. If that works out and there’s a manuscript on an idea available, I have to convince my editor-in-chief that it’s a good idea to buy and publish it. Then we negotiate the contract and work with the author. When that’s done, we turn it over to the many people inside the company: the copy editors, the design department, subsidiary rights people, printers and book binders and so on. Once the book is completed one waits to see what the response will be. … If you’ve published the author’s work before, you try to direct his or her career; pace them; build it; help them.⁵

From “Toni Morrison’s Saga Is Praised in All the Proper Places” (1977).

I knew my great-grandmother … She was a black woman, a very dark lady with white hair. And I remember my grandmother sitting on a bureau, swinging her feet like a little girl in the presence of this woman, it seemed strange to me. And the men, they were interesting, very, very competent, very resilient. And roomers, you always had a roomer in those days.

In the heart of the Depression, [her father] had Florsheim shoes, wore natty clothes, even gambled. He was the kind of man who was at home anywhere … Even in joints. He knew the kind of men that didn’t belong to my mother’s church, but he mellowed and eventually became a church member. And I remember one tale. You know how the churches sell dinner, for years … to build a new church. Well, if the church didn’t sell all the dinners, my father would take the leftover plates and go sell them in the joints. It was in one of

these joints that my father went to sell some barbecue dinners, a joint on Vine Street in Lorain, and these two dudes were getting ready to shoot one another. My father walked in and said, “You niggers, put those guns down and you buy this barbecue.” As so they did. Bought the plates and proceeded to eat the barbecue.⁶

From “Cinderella’s Stepsisters” (1979).

I am alarmed by the violence that women do to each other: professional violence, competitive violence, emotional violence. I am alarmed by the willingness of women to enslave other women. 1 am alarmed by a growing absence of decency of the killing floor of professional women’s worlds.⁷

From “Toni Morrison’s Black Magic” (1981).

My grandfather had left Greenville for Birmingham to earn money playing the violin. He sent money back, but my grandmother began to get nervous, all alone in Greenville, because her daughters were reaching puberty and that was dangerous business in the South, in the country, because white boys began to circle. So my grandmother decided to leave. She sent her husband an oral message: “We’re heading north on the midnight train. If you ever want to see us again, you’ll be on that train.”

She didn’t know if he got the message, but with $18 to her name she packed up her six or seven children and got them all to the train in Birmingham. It was the first city my mother had ever seen… . My grandfather was nowhere in sight. As the train left the station the children began to cry—then about an hour later, he showed up. He’d been there all along, hiding, for fear somebody would recognize him and stop him for owing money.⁸

From “A Conversation with Toni Morrison” (1981).

Since it was possible for my mother, my grandmother and her mother to do what they did, which to me is scary, really scary—snatching children and roaming around in the night; running away from the South and living in Detroit, can’t read or write; in a big city trying to stay alive and keep those children when you can’t even read the road signs—now, these are hard things to do. And if they can do that, surely 1 can work at Random House and cook—I mean, what is it after all? You know, the worst that can happen is that I get fired and have to do something else.

1 know I can’t go to those women and say, “Well, you know, my life is so hard. I live in New York and it’s just.…” They don’t want to hear that! They were boiling sheets and shooting pheasant and stuff, then they got married to people and had children and fights. And the world was different then—white people were not punished for killing Black folks.

That’s all history means to me. It’s a very personal thing—if their blood is in my veins, maybe I can do this little part right here. I don’t want to meet them people nowhere—ever!—and have them look at me and say, “What were you doing back there?”…

I feel no success with my sons, I feel no success as an editor—because nothing has been completed. Anything may happen at any moment. If I’m a hundred and they are 70,I would still go to them if they break a hip. And with the editing thing, there is so much to be done, and I can only do so little. I should have—I would like to have—my own line. It should be done. Somebody in a major publishing house should do it. I can’t—it requires more days and more energy than I have.

… When I publish Toni Cade Bambara, when I publish Gayl Jones, if they would do what my own books have done [in sales], then I would feel really fantastic about it. But the market can only receive one or two [Black women writers]. Dealing with five Toni Morrisons would be problematic. I’m not talking about quality of work—who writes better than I do and stuff. I’m just talking about the fact that, in terms of new kinds of writing, the marketplace receives only one or two Blacks in days when it’s not fashionable. That’s true of literature in general, but it’s particularly true for Black writing.

I can’t rely on a huge, aggressive Black buying audience. But I think that will all change. You see, Black people don’t just read, they have to absorb something. I’ve tried to write books so that whoever reads them absorbs them—so that the process of reading them means you have to take it in. That’s a slower way to do it, but people participate in the books heavily. Two thousand people bought The Bluest Eye in hardback and maybe 12,000 or 15,000 bought Sula. Then it tripled for Song of Solomon. And maybe it will triple again for Tar Baby.

But the point is that once there can be a commercial success of a book that is clearly, relentlessly Black’and I don’t care if they handle it as just “this one little colored girl up here today”’it opens a door. So no one can ever say again it can’t be one.⁹

From “An Interview with Toni Morrison, Hessian Radio Network, Frankfurt, West Germany” (1983).

I was not prepared for what appears obvious now: the differences between men and women, or boy children and girl children. I had two brothers who were younger than I and I thought I was very adept, but I had some other notions about what one has to deliver to the children’especially as a single parent. 1 thought that I should be mother and father, but that did not work at all. I was not a good father’I was a good head-of-household, in terms of my earning ability, and then I discovered (maybe a little late for them), that you can be only what you are, and deliver what you have, and that you can’t provide the other things. They’ll have to learn them elsewhere. As boys, my sons were attracted to danger and risk in a way that I was not. They had different spatial requirements than girls, or I ever had. And part of that may be education and socialization, but nevertheless, there they were’these male children who tended to eat up the house. They related to architecture and space differently. Their demands on a mother were very primitive; they didn’t really care what I was about, they wanted service and attention and, at different points in their lives, conversation. They wanted me as a base line from which they operated. They wanted different kinds of intimacy’it was all very strange. I don’t have girl children, and perhaps if I did, I’d say something equally astonishing about them. It was curious’I found the boys useful when I was doing Song of Solomon, because having watched them grow up, I was able, I think, to enter into a male view of the world, which, to me, means a delight in dominion’a definite need to exercise dominion over place and people. My upbringing was very strict, we were passive girls and we took orders well. We did not issue orders with a great deal of ease, the way my children can do. This is all stereotypical and general, obviously there are variations in men and women, but if you think of the classic definition of masculinity versus femininity, then there is the question of dominion. I watched them in their play and in that desire to control, and when 1 was writing Song of Solomon, which is driven by male characters (it’s the only book that has that focus), and I had to change the language a lot, the metaphors, so having children was helpful.¹⁰

From “An Interview with Toni Morrison” (1983).

My life seems to be dominated by information about black women. They were the culture bearers, and they told us what to do. But in terms of story-telling, 1 remember it more as a shared activity between the men and the women in my family. There was a comradeship between men and women in the marriages of my grandparents, and of my mother and father. The business of story-telling was a shared activity between them, and people of both genders participated in it. We, the children, were encouraged to participate in it at a very early age. This was true with my grandfather and grandmother, as well as with my father and mother, and with my uncles and aunts. There were no conflicts of gender in that area, at the level at which such are in vogue these days. My mother and my father did not fight about who was supposed to do what. Each confronted whatever crisis there was.¹¹

From “Toni Morrison” (1983).

There’s a difference between writing for a living and writing for life. If you write for a living, you make enormous compromises, and you might not ever be able to uncompromise yourself. If you write for life, you’ll work hard; you’ll do it in a disciplined fashion; you’ll do what’s honest, not what pays. You’ll be willing to say no when somebody wants to play games with your work. You’ll be willing to not sell it. You’ll have a very strong sense of your work, your self development.¹²

From “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” (1984).

There is a conflict between public and private life, and it’s a conflict that I think ought to remain a conflict. Not a problem, just a conflict. Because they are two modes of life that exist to exclude and annihilate each other. It’s a conflict that should be maintained now more than ever because the social machinery of this country at this time doesn’t permit harmony in a life that has both aspects. I am impressed with the story of’ probably Jefferson, perhaps not, who walked home alone after the presidential inauguration. There must have been a time when an artist could be genuinely representative of the tribe and in it; when an artist could have a tribal or racial sensibility and an individual expression of it. There were spaces and places in which a single person could enter and behave as an individual within the context of the community. A small remnant of that you can see sometimes in Black churches where people shout. It is a very personal grief and a personal statement done among people you trust. Done within the context of the community, therefore safe. And while the shouter is performing some rite that is extremely subjective, the other people are performing as a community in protecting that person. So you have a public and a private expression going on at the same time. To transfer that is not possible. So I just do the obvious, which is to keep my life as private as possible; not because it is all that interesting, it’s just important that it be private. And then, whatever I do that is public can be taken seriously.¹³

From “A Conversation: Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison” (1985).

I was really in a comer. And whatever was being threatened by the circumstances in which I found myself, alone with two children in a town where I didn’t know anybody, I knew that I would not deliver to my children a parent that was of no use to them. So 1 was thrown back on, luckily, the only thing I could depend on, my own resources. And I felt that the world was going by in some direction that I didn’t understand and I was not in. Whatever was going on was not about me and there were lots of noises being made about how wonderful I was’ “black woman you are my queen.” I didn’t believe it. I thought it sounded like something I had heard when I was eleven, but the vocabulary was different. There was something in it I just didn’t trust. It was too loud. It was too grand. It was almost like a wish rather than a fact, that the men were trying to say something that they didn’t believe either. That’s what I thought. And so it looked as though the world was going by and I was not in that world. I used to live in this world, I mean really lived in it. I knew it. I used to really belong here. And at some point I didn’t belong here anymore. I was somebody’s parent, somebody’s this, somebody’s that, but there was no me in this world. And I was looking for that dead girl and I thought I might talk about that dead girl, if for no other reason than to have it, somewhere in the world, in a drawer. There was such a person. I had written this little story earlier just for some friends, so I took it out and I began to work it up. And all of those people were me. 1 was Pecola, Claudia. … I was everybody. And as I began to do it, I began to pick up scraps of things that I had seen or felt, or didn’t see or didn’t feel, but imagined. And speculated about and wondered about. And I fell in love with myself. I reclaimed myself and the world’a real revelation. I named it. I described it. I listed it. I identified it. I recreated it. And having done that, at least, then the books belonged in the world. Although I still didn’t belong. I was working hard at a job and trying to be this competent person. But the dead girl’and not only was that girl dead in my mind, I thought she was dead in everybody’s mind, aside from my family and my father and mother’that person didn’t exist anywhere. That person. Not the name, but the person. I thought that girl was dead. 1 couldn’t find her. I mean, I could see her on the street or the bus, but nobody wrote about her. Which isn’t entirely accurate. People had done that. But for me at that time that was them, that was not me. People ask, “Is your book autobiographical?” It is not, but it is, because of that process of reclamation. And I was driven there, literally driven. I felt penned into a basement, and I was going to get out of it. I remembered being a person who did belong on this earth. I used to love my company and then I didn’t. And 1 realized the reason I didn’t like my company was because there was nobody there to like. I didn’t know what happened. I had been living some other person’s life. It was too confusing. I was interested primarily in the civil rights movement. And it was in that flux that I thought … I guess it was right there. It was my time of life also. The place where those things came together. And I thought that there would be no me. Not us or them or we, but no me. If the best thing happened in the world and it all came out perfectly in terms of what the gains and goals of the Movement were, nevertheless nobody was going to get away with that; nobody was going to tell me that it had been that easy. That all I needed was a slogan: “Black is Beautiful.” It wasn’t that easy being a little black girl in this country’it was rough. The psychological tricks you have to play in order to get through’and nobody said how it felt to be that. And you knew better. You knew inside better. You knew you were not the person they were looking at. And to know that and to see what you saw in those other people’s eyes was devastating. Some people made it, some didn’t.¹⁴

From “An Interview with Toni Morrison” (1985).

But the consciousness of being Black I think happened when I left Cor-nell and went to teach at Texas Southern University. … I had never been in a Black school like that. 1 don’t mean my awareness was all that intense, but even at Howard University where I went to school, I remember I asked once to do a paper in the English Department on Black Characters in Shakespeare, and they were very much alarmed by that’horrified by it, thought it was a sort of lesser topic, because Howard wasn’t really like that. It was very sort of middle class, sort of upwardly mobile and so on. But when I left Cornell and went to Houston, even though I was only there a year and a half, in the South they always had Negro History Week; I’d never heard of it. We didn’t have it in the North… . But then I began to think about all those books my mother always had in the house’J. A. Rodgers and all those people’and all those incredible conversations my grandfather had and all those arguments that would just hurt my head when I listened to them at the time suddenly had a different meaning. There was a difference between reading the Call and Post when it came or the Pittsburgh Courier and all the Black papers and then going someplace when there was something called the Black press. So I think it was as a novice teacher, and that was in 1957 or 1958, that I began to think about Black culture as a subject, as an idea, as a discipline. Before it had only been on a very personal level’my family. And 1 thought they were that way because they were my family.¹⁵

From “An Interview with Toni Morrison” (1986).

We do read books quite differently. I mean we’re taught to read them like you open a medicine cabinet and get out an aspirin and your headache is gone. Or people are looking for the “how-to” book’you know, thirty days and you’ll have a flat stomach, or three days as the case may be. So that they are looking for easy, passive, uninvolved and disengaged experiences’television experiences, and I won’t, I won’t do that.¹⁶

From “Author Toni Morrison Discusses Her Latest Novel Beloved” (1987).

People give a lot of credence to the intelligence, the concentration, the imagination necessary for listening to music, but never for listening to stories. That somehow seems like a dumb thing that people who can’t read do. And I know how hard it is to listen, and what’s engaged when you listen.¹⁷

From “In the Realm of Responsibility: A Conversation with Toni Morrison”(1987).

I was sitting in a radio station somewhere and the man who was interviewing me said, “What are you saying about Black women in this book, when Sethe survives and gets across the river and her husband doesn’t?” And I said, “What do you mean?” And he said, “Are you saying that the women are stronger?” I said, “They’re not stronger. What about Halle? You couldn’t ask for a stronger man. He sold his life so that the women and the children could be free.” This man wanted to engage me in a fake argument, a divisive controversy. I said, “Sethe makes it, she’s tough, but some things are beyond endurance and you need some help. So she has some finally from the women and then from Paul D.”¹⁸

From “Toni Morrison’s Work Needs No Lobbying” (1988).

I had some dark thoughts about whether [Beloved’s] merits would be allowed to be the only consideration of the Pulitzer committee … The book had begun to take on a responsibility, an extra-literary responsibility that it was never designed for.”¹⁹

From “The Pain of Being Black” (1989).

Some historians told me 200 million died. The smallest number I got from anybody was 60 million. There were travel accounts of people who were in the Congo’that’s a wide river’saying, “We could not get the boat through the river, it was choked with bodies.” That’s like a logjam. A lot of people died. Half of them died in those slave ships.

Slave trade was like cocaine is now’even though it was against the law, that didn’t stop anybody. Imagine getting $1,000 for a human being. That’s a lot of money. There are fortunes in this country that were made that way.

I thought this [Beloved] has got to be the least read of all the books I’d written because it is about something that the characters don’t want to remember, I don’t want to remember, black people don’t want to remember, white people don’t want to remember. I mean, it’s national amnesia.²⁰

From “An Inspired Life: Toni Morrison Writes and a Generation Listens” (1992).

My rank in terms of writing is of no interest to me. The truth is that you have to face blank paper, and labels don’t help you much.

I am happy if I can serve as an inspiration to others and to women who want to write. But it’s not right for people to transfer their own internal responsibilities to a role model. My job is to be a morally responsible human being. And that’s a private struggle.²¹

From Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992).

Writing and reading are not all that distinct for a writer. Both exercises require being alert and ready for unaccountable beauty, for the intricateness or simple elegance of the writer’s imagination, for the world that imagination evokes. Both require being mindful of the places where imagination sabotages itself, locks its own gates, pollutes its vision. Writing and reading mean being aware of the writer’s notions of risk and safety, the serene achievement of, or sweaty fight for, meaning and response-ability.²²

From Jazz (1992).

I lived a long time, maybe too much, in my own mind. People say I should come out more. Mix. I agree that I close off in places, but if you have been left standing, as I have, while your partner overstays another appointment, or promises to give you exclusive attention after supper, but is falling asleep just as you have begun to speak-well, it can make you inhospitable if you aren’t careful, the last thing I want to be.²³

From “Toni Morrison: The Art of Fiction CXXXIV” (1993).

I try to give some credibility to all sorts of voices, each of which is profoundly different. Because what strikes me about African-American culture is its variety. In so much of contemporary music everybody sounds alike. But when you think about black music, you think about the difference between Duke Ellington and Sidney Bechet or Satchmo or Miles Davis. They don’t sound anything alike, but you know that they are all black performers, because of whatever that quality is that makes you realize, “Oh yes, this is part of something called the African-American music tradition.” There is no black woman popular singer who sounds like any other. Billie Holiday does not sound like Aretha, doesn’t sound like Nina, doesn’t sound like Sarah, doesn’t sound like any of them. They are really powerfully different. And they will tell you that they couldn’t possibly have made it as singers if they sounded like somebody else. If someone comes along sounding like Ella Fitzgerald, they will say, “Oh we have one of those… . It’s interesting to me how those women have this very distinct, unmistakable image. I would like to write like that. I would like to write novels that were unmistakably mine, but nevertheless fit first into African-American traditions and second of all, this whole thing called literature.²⁴

From Lecture and Speech of Acceptance, upon the Award of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1994).

The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, midwifery properties, replacing them with menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity-driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek-it must be rejected, altered, and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. 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.”²⁵

From “Chloe Wofford Talks About Toni Morrison” (1994).

I regard the fact that my house burned down after I won the Nobel Prize to be better than having my house burn down without having won the Nobel Prize. Most people’s houses just burn down. Period.

When I think about the fire, I think I may not ever, ever, ever get over it. And it isn’t even about the things. It’s about photographs, plants I nurtured for 20 years, about the view of the Hudson River, my children’s report cards, my manuscripts. There were some months when I wouldn’t talk to anybody who had not had a house burn down.²⁶

From “Great Minds Come Together in Atlanta” (1995).

We tend to discredit the child or the adult who values solitude … but that state is important.²⁷

From The Dancing Mind (1996).

There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war. It is larger than that. The peace 1 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.²⁸

From “The Salon Interview: Toni Morrison” (1998).

I really have very few friends who are writers. I have some close friends who are writers, but that’s because they’re such extraordinary people. The writing is almost incidental to the friendship, I think. It was interesting to me that when books by black women first began to be popular, there was a non-articulated, undiscussed, umbrella rule that seemed to operate, which was: Never go into print damning one another. We were obviously free to loath each other’s work. But no one played into the “who is best.” There was this marvelous absence of competition among us. And every now and then I’d see a review’a black woman reviewer take another black woman writer, a critic usually, on’but usually it’s in that field of cultural criticism. Because it was always understood that this was a plateau that had a lot of space on it.²⁹

From Paradise (1998).

The evening had turned chilly but still not cold enough for snow. The lemon mint had shriveled, but lavender and sage bushes were full and fragrant. No wind to speak of, so the fire in the oil barrel was easily contained. One by one she dropped cardboard files, sheets of paper-both stapled and loose’into the flames. She had to tear the covers off the composition notebooks and hold them slant with a stick so they would not smother the fire. The smoke was bitter. She stepped back and gathered clumps of lavender and threw it in as well. It took some time, but finally she turned her back on the ashes and walked into her house trailing along the odor of burnt lavender.

… .“Dear God,” she murmured. “Dear, dear God. I burned the papers.”³⁰

From “Toni Morrison AOL Live Chat” (2000).

I have just begun to write a new novel. Most of the novels I have written have taken four to six years so I expect to be finished in 2002 or 2003.³¹

From “The Dead of September 11” (2001).

To speak to you, the dead of September, I must not claim false intimacy or summon an overheated heart glazed just in time for a camera. I must be steady and I must be clear, knowing all the time that I have nothing to say—no words stronger than the steel that pressed you into itself; no scripture older or more elegant than the ancient atoms you have become.

NOTES

1. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Plume, 1994), p. 24.

2. Morrison, “Race Relations; On to Disneyland and Real Unreality,” New York Times, 20 October 1973, 4A: 1.

3. Morrison, “Behind the Making of The Black Book,” Black World, 23 (February 1974): 86-87.

4. Robert Stepto, “Intimate Things in Place: A Conversation with Toni Morrison,” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, edited by Danielle Taylor-Guthrie (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1994), p. 11.

5. Jessica Harris, “I Will Always Be a Writer,” Essence, 7 (December 1976): 56.

6. Karen De Witt, “Toni Morrison’s Saga Is Praised in All the Proper Places,” Washington Post, 30 September 1977, Cl.

7. Morrison, “Cinderella’s Stepsisters,” Ms., 8 (September 1979): 42.

8. Jean Strouse, “Toni Morrison’s Black Magic,” Newsweek, 97 (30 March 1981): 53.

9. Judith Wilson, “A Conversation with Toni Morrison,” in Conversations with Toni Morrisonx, pp. 131-134.

10. Rosemarie K. Lester, “An Interview with Toni Morrison, Hessian Radio Network, Frankfurt, West Germany,” in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, edited by Nellie Y. McKay (Boston: Hall, 1988), pp. 47-48.

11. McKay, “An Interview with Toni Morrison,” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, pp. 140-141.

12. Claudia Tate, “Toni Morrison,” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, p. 170.

13. Morrison, “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation,” in Black Women Writers (1950-1980), edited by Mari Evans (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984), p. 339.

14. Gloria Naylor, “A Conversation: Gloria Naylor and Toni Morrison,” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, pp. 198-199.

15. Bessie W. Jones and Audrey Vinson, “An Interview with Toni Morrison,” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, p. 174.

16. Christina Davis, “An Interview with Toni Morrison,” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, pp. 232-233.

17. Gail Caldwell, “Author Toni Morrison Discusses Her Latest Novel Beloved,” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, p. 243.

18. Marsha Darling, “In the Realm of Responsibility: A Conversation with Toni Morrison,” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, p. 250.

19. Maria D. Vesperi, “Toni Morrison’s Work Needs No Lobbying,” St. Petersburg Times, 3 April 1988, D3.

20. Bonnie Angelo, “The Pain of Being Black,” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, p. 257.

21. Dana Micucci, “An Inspired Life: Toni Morrison Writes and a Generation Listens,” in Conversations with Toni Morrison, p. 279.

22. Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. xi.

23. Morrison, Jazz (New York: Plume, 1992), p. 9.

24. Elissa Schappell and Claudia Brodsky Lacour, “Toni Morrison: The Art of Fiction CXXXIV” Paris Review, 35 (Fall 1993): 117-118.

25. Morrison, Lecture and Speech of Acceptance, upon the Award of the Nobel Prize for Literature (New York: Knopf, 1994), pp. 15-17.

26. Claudia Dreifus, “Chloe Wofford Talks About Toni Morrison,” New York Times Magazine, 11 September 1994, p. 74.

27. Eric Harrison, “Great Minds Come Together in Atlanta,” Los Angeles Times, 28 April 1995, E8.

28. Morrison, The Dancing Mind (New York: Knopf, 1996), p. 7.

29. Zia Jaffrey, “The Salon Interview: Toni Morrison,” Salon.com (2 February 1998).

30. Morrison, Paradise (New York: Knopf, 1998), pp. 216-217.

31. “Toni Morrison AOL Live Chat,” Oprah.com (25 May 2000) <http://oprah.com/com/chat/transcript/obc/chat_trans_tmorris... >.

32. “Morrison, “The Dead of September 11,” Vanity Fair, special edition insert, 495 (November 2001): 48.