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I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.

Toni Morrison

I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.

Toni Morrison

I'm always annoyed about why black people have to bear the brunt of everybody else's contempt. If we are not totally understanding and smiling, suddenly we're demons.

Toni Morrison

I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.

Toni Morrison

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

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

Toni Morrison

If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.

Toni Morrison

If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.

Toni Morrison

In becoming an American, from Europe, what one has in common with that other immigrant is contempt for me-it's nothing else but color.

Toni Morrison

In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.

Toni Morrison

It's been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it's about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion.

Toni Morrison

Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all.

Toni Morrison

Make a difference about something other than yourselves.

Toni Morrison

My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.

Toni Morrison

Nelson Mandela is, for me, the single statesman in the world. The single statesman, in that literal sense, who is not solving all his problems with guns. It's truly unbelievable.

Toni Morrison

No one ever talks about the moment you found that you were white. Or the moment you found out you were black. That's a profound revelation. The minute you find that out, something happens. You have to renegotiate everything.

Toni Morrison

One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.

Toni Morrison

Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty out a long, long time.

Toni Morrison

She is a friend of mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order. It's good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind.

Toni Morrison

Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.

Toni Morrison