Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrisonis an American novelist, editor, and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. Her novels are known for their epic themes, vivid dialogue, and richly detailed characters. Among her best known novels are The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth18 February 1931
CityLorain, OH
CountryUnited States of America
cent designed dose education eighty liberal per useful work
Bryn Mawr had done what a four-year dose of liberal education was designed to do: unfit her for eighty per cent of useful work of the world.
fear boys black
Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.
jobs freedom real
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.
bit claimed claiming freed freeing ownership self
Bit by bit . . . she had claimed herself. Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another.
artist became
And like any artist with no art form, she became dangerous.
writing interesting creative
What's interesting about writing is the invention, the creative thing. Writing about myself is a yawn.
memories home people
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.
girl struggle boys
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.
important want intimacy
Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers.
reading writing thinking
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.
jobs struggle book
I feel like today we always glorify the young, just-plucked-from-college writer. But it's much harder to start writing later, in middle age, struggling on a book around a full-time job and family.
beautiful mother distance
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.
dark skin-color white
This is really skin privilege, the ranking of color in terms of its closeness to white people or white-skinned people and its devaluation according to how dark one is and the impact that has on people who are dedicated to the privileges of certain levels of skin color.
war school europe
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.