Toni Morrison Quotes

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic.

I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.

I feel like reading really defined me as a writer because I lived my life outside of my own body for so much of my life and I loved it. I've always been a reader. I think living all those stories served me to naturally take that next step to creating.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

A picture can say 1000 words but it can also inspire you to write 1000 more.

I think, if you want to grow a novelist, for that person to have a lot of boring time trying to entertain themselves is very important.

There is no lighter burden, nor more agreeable, than a pen.

Read a lot. Write a lot. Have fun.

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

The writing part of my life never changes, because that's just when the inspiration comes.

There's a mystery to writing, and you don't really know where most of it comes from.

What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

As long as there are things to wonder about, there are stories to be written about them. That makes me happy, because writing about things seems to be my thing.

There is the great creative part of it. The writing is the best part.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.

I write and I read, and I write and read my way into and out of ideas and life. And that's what we do. That's what storytellers do.

Something people say about acting is that acting is listening. But I think that writing is listening, too. That you really have to listen to what are they saying and what they're communicating to you. And so, a lot of it is just getting stuff down.

After putting the kids to bed, I would think about what I wanted to write.

When people ask me for secrets to writing, I say, 'Read to write.'

In terms of the symbolism, I think that if you do it right, writing is a bit like dreaming.

When you compose, it's like writing. You're like a writer. You just think all the time.

For me, the source material can come from anywhere. It can be a poem, it can be a dream, it can be a movie, as long as the end part of it is interesting - that's what it's about for me.