Toni Morrison Quotes

My relationship with my readers is somewhat theatrical. One of the main things I try to do in my work is delight my readers.

The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.

The measure of a conversation is how much mutual recognition there is in it; how much shared there is in it. If you're talking about what's in your own head, or without thought to what people looking and listening will feel, you might as well be in a room talking to yourself.

I'm never sure who I'm writing for, or who's reading me, but I definitely see myself in conspiracy with my readers.

There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, 'You must read this.' I've always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America, a discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.

The novelist in me is probably hiding behind all the stories I write, looking for ways to connect them and continue the conversation with readers. Maybe I'm writing one long narrative, and each book, however different from the last, is just a chapter.

A book is always a dialogue with other readers and other books.

I know that books seem like the ultimate thing that's made by one person, but that's not true. Every reading of a book is a collaboration between the reader and the writer who are making the story up together.

As an author, I really hate a reader like me. There's no loyalty.

Too many writers of fiction don't give the reader enough credit.

Probably, subliminally, I think of the reader as a kind of collaborator. I don't want to say something for the reader that the reader could have said for himself.

Collaboration is about listening to someone else and adding your own feelings about that thought.

Cooperation - To get cooperation, you must give cooperation. Always seek to find the best way rather than insisting on your own way.

The last page of [Lincoln in the Bardo] - without giving too much away - involves somebody entering somebody else. Not in a sexual way. But it says one of the simplest things you could ever say, which is that we must try and be inside each other. We must have some kind of feeling for each other and enter into each other's experience.

No matter how true I believe what I am writing to be, if the reader cannot also participate in that truth, then I have failed.

The aim of my writing is to utterly remove the distance between author and reader so that the book becomes a sort of semipermeable membrane through which feelings, ideas, nutrients pass.

My job is not to try to give readers what they want but to try to make readers want what I give.

I don't tell everything. I want the reader to have the feeling that maybe they know the whole truth, but they don't.

Reaching and understanding is the process of bringing about an agreement on the presupposed basis of validity claims that are mutually recognized.

Marriage is about compromise; it's about doing something for the other person, even when you don't want to.

Communication is mutual feeling with someone, not a didactic process of information.

Only through communication can human life hold meaning.

We should awaken feelings of respect for each other. In other words, awaken the desire to kill selfishness.

Within that moment was trust, compassion, and our mutual sense of irony. He was carrying death within him and I was carrying life. We were both aware of that, I know.

When I am convinced of any principle, it is only an idea which strikes more strongly upon me. When I give the preference to one set of arguments above another, I do nothing but decide from my feeling concerning the superiority of their influence.