Novelists From The United States

"I would never require anyone to read any book. That seems antithetical to why we read — which is to choose a book for our personal reasons. I always shudder when I’m told my books are on required reading lists."

"she's a fascinating writer."

"Toni Morrison writes about sex and desire in a way that makes me want to close the book and pray to the sky."

"I consider Toni Morrison the patron saint of my writing. To write with her level of honesty and clarity is my North Star."

"Toni Morrison is brilliant; she is one of the best writers around."

"To hold up the mirror of language to a society in fracture, porous with lying and shrill with contempt for meaning, is not the same thing as creating-if only in the poem itself-another kind of space where other human and verbal relationships are possible. What Toni Morrison calls the "struggle to interpret and perform within a common language shareable imaginative worlds" surely requires keeping that language "endlessly flexible." It also requires vigilance against self-reference and solipsism."

"Ms. Morrison is a person who gives you her full attention; who wants, even in the context of an interview, to have a conversation; who is entirely self-possessed without being the least bit self-obsessed; who is at every minute teaching, and at every minute eager to learn."

"To stay awake, I listened to audio-books, the longer the better-novels mostly (John le Carré and Toni Morrison were favorites)"

"(I recommend over and over again:) A three-way tie of Toni Morrison books: The Bluest Eye, Beloved, and Jazz. Amazing novels—and for writers, master classes in basically everything."

"I remember reading that [The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison] in high school and my mind being blown. I remember that book being really, really pivotal for me in actually getting me interested in reading."

"With greater solidarity, justice for people of color could be won. And an even bigger prize would be possible: a U.S. society that advances beyond "equality," beyond granting people of color a respect equal to that given to Euro-Americans. Too often "equality" leaves whites still at the center, still embodying the Americanness by which others are judged, still defining the national character. In her book Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison writes eloquently of this problem from an African-American perspective. Her words resonate for other peoples of color as well: "American means white, and Africanist people struggle to make the term applicable to themselves with ethnicity and hyphen after hyphen after hyphen.... In the scholarship on the formation of an American character [a] major item to be added to the list must be an Africanist presence-decidedly not American, decidedly 'other.'"

"Of course Toni Morrison's work has been important to me, and that of Maxine Hong Kingston. Both women have encouraged me to believe that I'm on the right track, and that we share something-that it's not so lonely, for there are other women and other people thinking and writing about the same sorts of things."

"Reviewers tend to have trouble with a writer like Toni Morrison, getting a handle on her, because she is doing something truly new. This is always difficult."

"Speaking of secrecy, did you notice that Alice Walker and Toni Morrison both began books with almost that same sentence: "You must not tell anyone,' my mother said, 'what I am about to tell you." " Alice Walker's novel [The Color Purple] begins: "You better not tell nobody but God," and then Toni Morrison [in The Bluest Eye] has the line, "Quiet as it's kept..." You see everybody has that same line; it's the same struggle to break through taboos, to find your voice. It's that same "exile, secrecy, and cunning" that Joyce was talking about."

"Toni Morrison and I and Leslie Marmon Silko traveled through China together five years ago, with Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Francine du Plessix Gray. ..Toni Morrison talked about her method of writing-she saw the novel like a big painting, all black, and then there's orange over here and blue over here. So she thinks about various incidents in color terms: because maybe we have some blood red over here, we've got to balance with some more over here. Like a painter...In Beloved, she is getting for the black people alive now, for all of us, she's getting the energy from the ancestors. The way you get energy from the ancestors is you find out the truth about them. Some of her images-putting a gag in a slave's mouth that has to do with silence and voice and freedom. By writing that book she takes the gag out. Toni is so important. The Chinese have had a lot of help remembering ancestors because we have a whole religion around it. But there's been all kinds of attacks against blacks to take the history away, take the voice away. That's what it means to put that gag on. Toni is someone who can tap into her ancestral memory, her collective unconscious."

"it looks like Leslie Silko and Toni Morrison are doing what I'm doing too. When we've talked about our backgrounds in myth and storytelling, it sounds like we grew up in very similar ways. Toni was trying to figure out where we belong, and she kept using that term "magical realism"; she thought we were in that tradition...we went to China together. I do feel an affinity not only because I love them as people but because we seem to write alike. There is so much human emotion and richness and story and imagery and colors and things to eat. Nobody is alienated from life; everybody is warm. I feel that we write like that because we are warm, and even though we all-I hate to say master-we are all very good with words, words aren't the only thing that's important. We care about stories about people, and also that magical real place that we are all visiting. When I compare our work to some of the mainstream work, it seems as if many of them are only playing with words. The "language" people's world seems gray and black and white. Toni's and Leslie's and my aliveness must come from our senses of a connection with people who have a community and a tribe. We are living life in a more dangerous place. We do not live in new subdivisions without ceremony and memory; and if those other writers have to draw from that non-magical imagination, then of course, their writing will be gray and black and white."

"I’ve been inspired by the profound and timeless writings of James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, and Nina Simone."

"(Whom do you consider your literary heroes?) Toni Morrison, Grace Paley, Emily Brontë, Ray Bradbury, all for different reasons, all adored...My favorite novelist working today is our greatest living writer, Toni Morrison. Nothing compares with her lyrical, heart-wrenching, gorgeous prose."

"Don't forget books. What would life be without them? Emily Brontë, Edgar Allan Poe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, William Faulkner. Read the greats-they're great for a reason. They know how to chart the human soul. (p 32)"

"The message seems to be that if you're white, you're a user. You can go home. But if you're black, you're a trafficker. You must go to jail. And you can remain there for several months without ever appearing before a judge...Toni Morrison's extraordinary novel Paradise came to mind. In it, the author noted that paradise is "defined by who's not there, by the people who are not allowed in.""

"Toni Morrison did create her own world of English. She made a space in novel form that would allow her and her people and their stories, and her telling of them to live. Her stories have rejuvenated American literature...world literature. All artists like to think their work will help rejuvenate culture, and art."

"As I was writing the first draft (of Libertie), I was also teaching the Toni Morrison novel Love. I was reading a lot of her interviews around the time that book came out, and she did this really wonderful interview with Charlie Rose. He asks her about her characters being happy and she says something like, “They know something about themselves that they didn’t know before. And so in that way, they have won.” And she said, “Winning isn’t like your character gets a fancy car at the end or a big job, or gets the girl or anything like that. Winning is, they didn’t know something about themselves before and now they understand something about themselves fundamentally at the end of the narrative. And in that way, they have ‘won.’” And then she says, sort of very playfully, as she does in her interviews, she says, “I only write about winners.” So I think about that a lot when I’m writing and thinking about what sort of choices the characters make and why you may follow a character through a story and what that might look like when you’re writing."

"My ambition, that toward which I aspire to write, has long been guided by Toni Morrison, Beloved, and through her words, seeing how a novel can be mysterious and true, mythical and raw, how a novel can honor memory even when we want to look away or forget."

"She writes such complicated, interwoven, shocking, comforting, rich internal lives for her characters. She is a master of physical sensation and description and demanding narratives. And she is a very brave writer, too, as well as a funny down-to-earth person. I once heard her read, and began to cry, her voice has such a quiet and moving power. Vitality."

"Toni Morrison, Kay Boyle, Philip Roth, Peter Matthiessen, Anne Tyler, and Rosellen Brown read an unknown manuscript and responded with those quotes and marks of approval that appear on book jackets. These were completely unsolicited and I still find it remarkable that these writers, overwhelmed with pleas and manuscripts, picked up Love Medicine and responded. There were a great number of people kind along the way. One hears much more about the egomania and posturing of writers than one does about the devotion that writers have for one another's work."

"To me, the great writers who come from ethnic minorities writing in English come from America. I think the deep, the real deep thinkers now writing in the English language are the black women, such as Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Alice Walker, etc. (F.J.: Where they are using black English in a certain kind of way to signify their difference?) Emecheta: Exactly."

"A further measure of the importance of the feminism of women of color was the tremendous efflorescence in their fiction. The writings of Toni Morrison, Sandra Cisneros, Amy Tan, and Louise Erdrich, among others, played a major role in bringing the feminist message and perspective to the masses of American women."

"I read Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and it changed the way I saw the world and what was possible in fiction."

"So many of us feel that we have found ourselves through, because of and in relation to Toni and her work...I was in my late twenties when we met. And although she was in her early forties, she was not yet Toni Morrison, the internationally acclaimed writer. But she was on a mission to open the U.S. publishing industry to black writers and activists. “I wanted to give back something,” she later said to Hilton Als. “I wasn’t marching. I didn’t go to anything. I didn’t join anything. But I could make sure there was a published record of those who did march and did put themselves on the line”...I learned so much from Toni: the evocative element of perception and language, the expansiveness of the political beyond traditional realms of power, the importance of identifying and attempting to contest the white gaze, the male gaze. But what I value most among all of her many gifts is how she demonstrated a way of being in the world that allowed her simultaneously to inhabit multiple dimensions. She was always here and there at the same time, totally present with you, but also, at the same time, creating new universes."

"The immigrant artist, to borrow from Toni Morrison's Nobel lecture knows what it is "to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear" our company, hamlets that need our labor but want our children banned from their schools, villages that want our sick shut out from their hospitals, big cities that want our elderly, after a lifetime of impossible labor, to pack up and go off somewhere else to die."

"Your work, my goodness, the work is sublime. And we do not just read it, we experience it. You gave us both lullabies and battle cries. You turned pain into flesh, and you brought spirits to life. You urged us to be dangerously free.You led this foreigner to a different type of home."

"It wasn't African literature that I came to first. It was the Afro-American women writers, I found them very helpful. (Such as, for example?) Toni Morrison, who is really incredible."

"She is undoubtedly a great writer, a remarkable stylist. This may appear a bit critical, but I find her very "politically correct." Unlike Alice Walker, she doesn't venture into topics like excision that may displease or irritate people. She doesn't extol homosexuality as Audre Lorde did. She doesn't proclaim extremist political convictions like Angela Davis. She is not violent. In my opinion, she doesn't disturb anybody. She paints her community, the African-American community, with the tested colors of magical realism."

"(What do you specifically like in Toni Morrison's works?) MC I particularly liked her first books, The Bluest Eye and Sula. I found her most recent works, Beloved and Jazz, somewhat hermetic in the way they were written. I think she went so far in her search for a specific writing style that these works are not easily accessible to a foreigner such as I. So I prefer the way Toni Morrison wrote at the beginning of her career."

"(How, or in what ways, has Morrison influenced you writing?) Cliff: Enormously. I don't think I could have written this novel if she hadn't written Beloved. Her imagining of that period, of slavery and its aftermath, opened up my imagination with regard to the rewriting of history, revising the history we've all been taught. And there are touches in my novel that would have been impossible without Morrison's having taken on the whole idea of bondage and resistance."

"Realism in Morrison's work is blurred. There's a scene in Sula where two little girls accidentally drown a much younger child and don't tell anybody about it. That's grotesque, maybe even fantastic, but I believed every word. I don't think it's at all unlikely that the girls would try to "Who, us?" their way out of it. There are several other things Morrison does in the book that are equally strange, but they rang absolutely true."

"Toni Morrison's gift is in allegory. Tar Baby is an allegory. In fact all her novels are. But they're hard to talk about in public. That's where you get in trouble because her books and allegory are not always what they seem to be about. I was too occupied with my recent illness to deal with Beloved. But, in general, she's taken a myth, or she takes what seems to be a myth, and turns it into something else. I don't know how to put this-Beloved could be about the story of truth. She's taken a whole lot of things and turned them upside down. Some of them-you recognize the truth in it. I think that Toni's very painful to read. (Why?) Because it's always, or most times, a horrifying allegory; but you recognize that it works. But you don't really want to march through it. Sometimes people have a lot against Toni, but she's got the most believing story of everybody, this rather elegant matron, whose intentions really are serious, and according to some people, lethal…"

"A black woman would have tremendous difficulties, like a black man, to go to the nitty gritty, to express what is really going on inside. Because what happens is that you are being treacherous. By telling the truth about myself I am telling the truth about my father, my mother and a whole lot of other people, too. You can get crucified for that…it's one of the things that happen when you live in a sick society. And some black women like Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Morrison and Paule Marshall have gotten beyond that at whatever price, but they got beyond it."

"I don’t think I would have ever written Bastard if I hadn’t read The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. In fact, I know I wouldn’t. It was like somebody cracked my world open when I read that book."

"Right now I am reading a group of women writers that belong to ethnic minorities in this country. They are great writers, Chicanas, Japanese, Latinas. They are writing extraordinary works, and they are taking over the world of literature that the white men in New York monopolized. Minimalist literature is dying. And it was about time. We are seeing a return to great narrations, to the baroque narrative. We are seeing a return to artistry in words, in sentences, in the extravagance of the story itself. I am very attracted by that. (...What do you think of Toni Morrison's work?) She is a good example of what we are speaking about. She is a black writer who publishes books of great interest to the public, where she also tells things that had to be told about slavery. She talks about poverty and the female condition. Toni Morrison heads that movement."

"Today, great writers from minority groups in the U.S. are finding their voice in the wonderful, rich imagery of magic realism. Writers such as Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Amy Tan all have a unique, rich way of writing that can be described as magic realism. These women are among those who have broken away from the style of writing that defines most of the fiction coming from industrialized countries: that pragmatic, minimalist style and way of facing reality in which the only things one dares talk about are those things one can control."

"The O.G. Toni Morrison."

"I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman."

"It is easily the most empty cliché, the most useless word, and at the same time the most powerful human emotion — because hatred is involved in it, too. I thought if I removed the word from nearly every other place in the manuscript, it could become an earned word. If I could give the word, in my very modest way, its girth and its meaning and its terrible price and its clarity at the moment when that is all there is time for, then the title does work for me."

"The idea of a wanton woman is something I have inserted into almost all of my books. An outlaw figure who is disallowed in the community because of her imagination or activity or status — that kind of anarchic figure has always fascinated me. And the benefits they bring with them, in spite of the fact that they are either dismissed or upbraided — something about their presence is constructive in the long run. (2003)"

"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. (1998)"

"For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction."

"You need intelligence, and you need to look. You need a gaze, a wide gaze, penetrating and roving — thats what's useful for art."

"Anger... it's a paralyzing emotion... you can't get anything done. People sort of think it's an interesting, passionate, and igniting feeling — I don't think it's any of that — it's helpless... it's absence of control — and I need all of my skills, all of the control, all of my powers — and I need clarity, in order to write — and anger doesn't provide any of that — I have no use for it whatsoever. I can feel melancholy, and I can feel full of regret, but anger is something that is useful to the people who watch it... it's not useful to me."

"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."