Toni Morrison Quotes

The hardest part is telling one's story. Once the story is on the page, the rest will come.

Everything in the world was about creativity: belief and creation. Storytelling was the essence of both.

In movies, storytelling and every single art form, we're creating wonder. You're starting with a blank page and creating something that doesn't exist.

I know how fiction matters to me, because if I want to express myself, I have to make up a story. Some people call it imagination. To me, it's not imagination. It's just a way of watching.

When I do my collection, it is in a way my own story.

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.

I like the idea that paintings are not representations of an artist's psyche. Making the paintings is what gives the artist her psyche in the first place.

To sit for one's portrait is like being present at one's own creation.

Every human is an artist. And this is the main art that we have: the creation of our story.

My favourite genre lies inside myself, and as I follow my favourite stories, characters and images, it sums up to a certain genre. So at times even I have to try to guess which genre a film will be after I've made it.

Writing isn't about the process. It is about creating. The joy comes not from the process but from the creation.

In my experience, a novel is the culmination of various thoughts and impressions collected over time, until something comes along to give them a shape, to turn them into a story.

Storytelling is really at the root of everything that I do.

As artists, our job is to communicate thoughts and tell stories.

You can only write your own vision.

I always say that I take my life and turn it into story, and I certainly did that with 'Countdown'.

Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action.

Take a step, breathe in the world, give it out again in story, poem, song, art.

I keep on having ideas and developments. Some happen and some don't, but I still always have a way of telling a story.

You know how writers are... they create themselves as they create their work. Or perhaps they create their work in order to create themselves.

It's a delicious thing to write. To be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating.

I'm a practised writer now. But when I began, I had no idea what this was going to be. I just knew that there was something inside me that wanted me to tell who I was, and that would have come out even if I didn't want it.

I love the creative process, of getting to create your own show or your own movie, whatever it is you want to do, and have the resources to try and make that happen.

That's the most amazing thing about writing, whether it's in prose or comics: that you can create something from nothing, and suddenly they come to life, like they've always been there.

By the time I sit down and face the blank page I am raring to go. I tell it as if I'm talking to my best friend or one of my grandchildren.