Toni Morrison: The Last Interview - Toni Morrison

Last updated Feb 6, 2025

• Author: Toni Morrison
• Full Title: Toni Morrison: The Last Interview
• Category: #books

But it was sad. One afternoon I was sitting at my desk just sort of being dismayed when I decided to call Toni. I probably talked more than ever and she was kind enough to listen. She finally said Nikki, Write. That’s all you can do. Write. (Location 77)

“The Black Book” (Location 118)

“You have to be black to understand black people’s anger, frustration, and enduring hope, so I doubt that any white person could have edited this book. (Location 119)

I had read a lot of very powerful black literature by men, but I had the feeling they were talking about somebody else. It was not for my enlightenment. It was for clarification… (Location 139)

It’s not a line. It’s where two things come together and touch. Each one, hopefully, is enhanced by its relationship to the other. (Location 177)

The idea of conflicting modes of life existing in the same place has always been a troublesome thing in this country. (Location 184)

As a woman with X and Y chromosomes, it seems to me that what women ought to be able to do it make reconciliations among these various types. (Location 187)

The enemy is not men. The enemy is the concept of patriarchy, (Location 193)

I do know that no one parent can raise a child completely. But it is also true that two parents can’t do it either. You need everybody. You need the whole community to raise a child. And one parent can get that community. You have to work at it. You have to decide. (Location 215)

Serious writers write things that compel them, new challenges, new situations, and a new landscape that they have not been in before. (Location 232)

this compulsion to nurture, this ferocity that a woman has to be responsible for her children. And at the same time, the kind of tensions that exist in trying to be a separate, complete individual. (Location 269)

if you focus on the characters and their interior life, it’s like putting the authority back into the hands of the slaves, rather than the slave owner. (Location 289)

It’s this relationship between ourselves and our personal history, and our racial history, and our national history, that sometimes gets made, you know, sort of distant. But if you make it into a person then it’s an inescapable confrontation. (Location 296)

My characters are not bigger than life. They are, in fact, as big as life. And life is really very big. We tend to cut it down these days, smaller and smaller and smaller, to make it fit— I don’t know what— a headline or a room. (Location 306)

We’ve been cut down to screen size, and to short articles. Dwelling in the life of a complicated person, over a complicated period, in fiction, is not in vogue. It’s shorter, it’s smaller, it’s a narrower geography. One can do it in history and biography, but not in contemporary life. (Location 315)

there was a sly encouragement to sort of expose the horrors of being victim, which some people played into. But it was like feeding the vampire with one’s own blood. Instead of describing, you know, a complicated, extraordinary, uh, survival life. (Location 329)

If I till that soil myself, in publicity, travelling around Europe, selling books, lecturing, what have you, then all of the younger people who won’t have to break down those same doors, they’ll be open. They will write infinitely better than I do. They will write of all sorts of things that no one writer can ever touch. They will be stronger, and they will be delicious to read. (Location 343)

a metaphor for the inner city today? TONI MORRISON: Love. We have to embrace ourselves. Self-regard. (Location 366)

James Baldwin said once, “You’ve already been bought and paid for, your ancestors already gave it up for you. It’s already done. You don’t have to do that anymore. Now you can love yourself. It’s already possible.” (Location 368)

black professional men who went every lunch hour to the playgrounds in Chicago’s South Side to talk to those children. Not to be authoritarian, but just to get to know them, without the bureaucracy, without the agencies, to simply become an agency. (Location 372)

It is more interesting, more complicated, more intellectually demanding and more morally demanding to love somebody, to take care of somebody, to make one other person feel good. (Location 403)

in the stories, the characters are placed by me on a cliff. I mean, I sort of push them as far as I can, to see of what they are made. (Location 419)

the whole notion of what is ugliness, what is worthlessness, what is contempt. She got it from her family, she got it from school, she got it from the movies, she got it everywhere. (Location 431)

The master narrative is whatever ideological script that is being imposed by the people in authority on everybody else. (Location 435)

For her, as an abused child, she can only escape into fantasy, into madness, which is part of what the mind is always creating, (Location 441)

It’s so risky. People don’t want to get hurt. They don’t want to be left. They don’t want to be abandoned, you see. It’s as though love is always some present you’ve given somebody else. And it’s really a present you’re giving yourself. (Location 448)

Song of Solomon, (Location 452)

They were just absolutely clear, and absolutely reliable. And they had this sort of intimate relationship with God and death and all sorts of things that strike fear into the modern heart. (Location 460)

They never knew from one day to the next about anything. But they believed in their dignity, that they were people of value, that they had to pass that on. (Location 465)

certainly feminine intelligence can bring is a kind of a look at the world as though you can do two things, or three things— the personality is more fluid, more receptive. The boundaries are not quite so defined. And I think that’s part of what modernism is. (Location 488)

All the books are questions for me. I mean, they start out— I write them because I don’t know something. (Location 510)

Liberating. Because of— the demands the children make are not the demands of a normal other. (Location 530)

You’ve seen those eyes of those children. They don’t want to hear it. They want to know, what are you going to do now, today? And somehow, all of the baggage that I had accumulated as a person about what was valuable, so much of that just fell away. And I could not only be me, whatever that was, somebody actually needed me to be that. (Location 536)

it was the right thing to do, but she had no right to do it. (Location 584)

we can talk about it now. We don’t have to call it nature, or we don’t have to call it radical political. We can say what it was, (Location 607)

it is about the construction of a white male. But what’s serviceable to him, to Huck, is this grown-up black man who is never called a man, who is the battle plain or the arena through which Huck can become a moral person. (Location 631)

those men are fighting and dying and willing to die for a very important cause, freedom, but it’s never contextualized. They’re not seen as having children, wives, aunts, mothers. (Location 648)

there’s a double bind in this country, because you had the twin evils of slavery, (Location 721)

Georgia, like Australia, was settled by— they won’t like this down in Georgia, but the fact of history is the fact, it was settled by debtors and ex-prisoners and criminals getting a second start over here. (Location 749)

And one learns very quickly what to belong to. And you belong to this non-black population, which is everywhere. (Location 763)

You take the modifiers out, you see. If you had— if Willa Cather had entitled her book Safira and Nancy, that changes the whole book. I mean, the strategies are different, the power relationships are different. But she said Safira and the Slave Girl. (Location 817)

Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case. (Location 857)

I’m very much interested in how African American literature is perceived in this country, and written about, and viewed. It’s been a long, hard struggle, and there’s a lot of work yet to be done. (Location 876)

In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can’t take positions that are closed. (Location 887)

Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book— leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity. (Location 888)

I’m not casting blame. I’m just trying to look at something without blinking, to see what it was like, or it could have been like, and how that had something to do with the way we live now. (Location 928)

I think I merged those two words, black and feminist, growing up, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and very aggressive and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes. (Location 933)

I wrote Sula, really, based on this theoretically brand-new idea, which was: Women should be friends with one another. And in the community in which I grew up, there were women who would choose the company of a female friend over a man, anytime. They were really “sisters,” in that sense. (Location 942)

the marketing shapes how we understand these books. (Location 968)

some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can’t expect to teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort. (Location 975)

I don’t tolerate any of that because most of the people who’ve ever written are under enormous duress, myself being one them. So whining about how they can’t get it is ridiculous. What I can do very well is what I used to do, which is edit. I can follow their train of thought, see where their language is going, suggest other avenues. (Location 980)

Very, very early in the morning, before they got up. I’m not very good at night. I don’t generate much. But I’m a very early riser, so I did that, and I did it on weekends. In the summers, the kids would go to my parents in Ohio, where my sister lives— my whole family lives out there— so the whole summer was devoted to writing. (Location 991)

You already know how to do that. So, while you’re doing that, you’re thinking. You know, it doesn’t take up your whole mind. Or just on the subway. I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in that packed train, (Location 996)

What he does is write me long, interesting letters. And the letters contain information about what’s strong, what’s successful, what troubles him, what stands out as being really awful, that kind of thing. (Location 1032)

Melancholy— meaning you’re resigned, or passive, in your responses? MORRISON: It’s overload. You sort of struggle to do four good things when you’re my age, and then not deal. (Location 1070)

four things. Make a difference about something other than yourselves. (Location 1072)

Black men in particular, and black people in general, are supposed to be able to do opposite-ends-of-the-scale things, and we don’t have to make sense. We’ve always been considered to be irrational, emotional, lunatic people. So if you have someone that was accepted in the mainstream world as exactly the opposite of that, the threat that one may fall back into chaos is always there. (Location 1086)

Part of the reason that the truth never emerged was not just the success of the defense team, but the media’s layering on. All these other issues were layered into this. (Location 1118)

I follow Márquez. I read anything by Márquez. Peter Carey is someone I’ve read off and on, but now I’ve become devoted to. I read Pynchon. I buy those books, list price. And who else? Jamaica Kincaid has a new book out that I haven’t read. I love her work. I relish her work. It is incisive and beautiful at the same time. (Location 1122)

we should stop thinking about these encounters— however long they are, because they do not last— as failures. When they’re just other things. You take something from it. (Location 1137)

I learned an enormous amount of self-esteem. Even though the collapse of the relationship suggested the opposite. For me, I just had to stand up. (Location 1141)

But they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to. Or, worse, my mother. Or worse, her mother. That it was all getting better. Not perfect, and not even good, but that at some level they wouldn’t have that. I was dead wrong. (Location 1154)

I always looked upon the acts of racist exclusion, or insult, as pitiable, from the other person. I never absorbed that. I always thought that there was something deficient— intellectual, emotional— about such people. I still think so, but I didn’t communicate it to my children enough. (Location 1186)

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. And it’s a profound psychological moment. (Location 1201)

Whatever there was is gone. It’s just the wrong place to store stuff. No excuses. The house burned. I lost a lot of stuff. (Location 1228)

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. (Location 1256)

Lorain, Ohio was right next to Oberlin. That part of Ohio was just loaded with abolitionists. Women were able to go to college at Oberlin before everybody else. (Location 1278)

they couldn’t tell anybody— they had to leave in the middle of the night because they were sharecroppers. They didn’t let you go anywhere. (Location 1297)

The story about him that I like best is his going to school one day to tell the teacher he couldn’t come back because he had to work, but his sisters would teach him to read. Because when I knew him, he’d do that all the time— you know, the Afro American and the Pittsburgh Courier and all those Black newspapers were in our house constantly, and he had this reputation of having read the Bible through, (Location 1321)

in some places, in some families, in some areas, we skipped that part. We just skipped it. They didn’t want to talk about it. They didn’t embed it in the poetry and in the songs. There were allusions to it— biblical, religious allusions, but no great details, and a lot of obfuscation as though if they were going to move on, (Location 1331)

big sort of absence. Not in the history, but certainly in the art, of what was actually really going on. You know, when you read slave narratives, as I did, and you can hear the gaps and misinformation there in talking to somebody. “It was terrible, it was terrible. But my master, he was fine!” They don’t want to be penalized, (Location 1334)

many African Americans don’t want to deal with the issue of slavery. (Location 1338)

If you don’t understand your past, you can’t transcend it, you might repeat it, you don’t understand half of your life. Knowledge is what’s important, you know? Not the erasure, but the confrontation of it. (Location 1341)

you get, in the mythology, a lot of information that is just unavailable in the history because the history’s going to be written by the conquerors, (Location 1349)

My mother on the other hand, treated every person she met as a possible friend. She always assumed the best. One at a time. (Location 1368)

I knew Black men who may have been rogues, but who if they saw me someplace where I shouldn’t be would take me home. They were safety for me. (Location 1401)

I was amused and impressed when my great-grandmother came in to visit us and all these uncles of mine who were sixteen, seventeen, stood up when she walked in the room. (Location 1406)

She would go in Saturday morning, the first day, just to see where the ushers were directing Black people. And she would always deliberately go someplace else. Or she would make us sit in these places where we didn’t want to sit because none of our friends were there, (Location 1418)

it had that really wonderful comfort zone of being without that little extra stress that’s there, that you don’t know is there until it disappears. (Location 1439)

But it didn’t bother me too long because I found the Howard Players. (Location 1450)

We had to read these plays. I mean really read them. Not just the way you read them in an English class. You had to really understand them in order to be able decide what the character— you know, the whole thing. (Location 1451)

what got you the part was merit, talent, ability to carry the role. And the people who were popular or sought after or at the top of the heap were the best, the most talented people, and I felt comfortable there. (Location 1454)

every summer some ten or nine or twelve of us, accompanied by faculty members, would travel through the south to campuses, Black campuses, and perform these plays. It was extraordinary. (Location 1457)

I was looking around to find somebody to do this book and I came across Spike Harris. Middleton Harris. And he was a collector. He just had everything. Every newspaper, every button, every book— just everything. And he knew other people who were also collectors. (Location 1490)

I think we forget something about slavery: There was an enormous amount of sexual license. People talk about, well, the money; the economy; the this… But you realize if you own a human being, you really own them. (Location 1504)

I was specifically interested in finding African American writers, people that agents didn’t even know about or didn’t have. So I threw out a net, so to speak, and I got lots of interesting people. (Location 1509)

Toni Cade Bambara, who was very special. (Location 1512)

I published the first, I think probably the only, book that Lucille Clifton did that was in prose. She did this book Generations, about her family. (Location 1512)

I published three books by Leon Forrest and they’re beautiful, powerful books, but very difficult books. (Location 1521)

Now that they did not let me keep on publishing— books that weren’t making any money. Although at one time in publishing you could do that… They decided that they had to make some money, you know, as all those publishers eventually did. You can see the consequences of it now. (Location 1523)

One of the most important books probably written in the United States is Ellison’s Invisible Man. (Location 1555)

They would say, you know, “I really and truly loved that book but I was very angry with you for exposing us.” And I would say, “Well how could I move you if I didn’t tell the truth?” I don’t have to apologize for our humanity. (Location 1561)

there was a time when people used to walk around singing, you know, before radios and before television. Just walk up and down the street, you hear people singing. Or in the backyard or in the kitchen. (Location 1577)

I’m working my way through it and then up comes something I realize I had invented this fabricated story about no White blood in my family. (Location 1624)

I was generally interested in taking the fluff and the veil and the flowers away from the ’50s. Was that what it was really like? (Location 1698)

the Korean War. It was called a “police action” then— never a war– even though 53,000 soldiers died. (Location 1703)

the narrative of the country, which was so aggressively happy. Postwar, everybody was making money, and the comedies were wonderful… And I kept thinking, That kind of insistence, there’s something fake about it. (Location 1729)

that’s only possible when you recognize failings and the injuries that you’ve either caused or that have been caused to you. Then you can think well of yourself because you survived them, confronted them, dealt with them, whatever. But you can’t just leap into self-esteem. (Location 1733)

I got very interested in the idea of when a man’s relationship with a woman is pure— unsullied, not fraught. If it’s his relationship with his mother or his girlfriend or his wife or his daughter, there’s always another layer there. The only relationship I thought that would be minus that would be a brother and a sister. It could be masculine and protective without the baggage of sexuality. (Location 1743)

There were two areas of total freedom for me. One has to do with my children, because they were the only ones who I knew who were not making insane demands on me. (Location 1771)

Outside was complicated. But the writing was the real freedom, because nobody told me what to do there. (Location 1775)

if you took the gaze of the white male— or even the white female, but certainly the male— out of the world, it was freedom! You could think anything, go anywhere, imagine anything… There was no longer the problem of looking through the master’s gaze. With that gaze, you’re always reacting, proving something. (Location 1784)

Intimacy is extremely important to me and I want it to be extremely important to the readers, too. (Location 1788)

Publishing was not on my mind. Long before I was living in Queens, I was teaching down in Washington and was surrounded by some serious writers and poets. They had a little group, and we met once a month and read our stuff. (Location 1794)

what racism does is create self-loathing, and it hurts. It can ruin you. (Location 1810)

Walt Whitman, (Location 1822)

Fran Lebowitz documentary, Public Speaking, (Location 1852)

Did you feel a real split between white and black feminists? MORRISON: Womanists is what black feminists used to call themselves. Very much so. They were not the same thing. And also the relationship with men. Historically, black women have always sheltered their men because they were out there, and they were the ones that were most likely to be killed. (Location 1885)

It was just the opposite in the African American communities, where you educated the girls and not the boys, because the girls could always go into nurturing professions— teachers, nurses… But if you educated your men, they would go into jobs where they would have to be confronted or held down. (Location 1890)

there’s a word that erases language, and then there’s the erasure of a word that produces a deranged kind of language. (Location 1938)

No one makes money with a nice novel, or an elegant one. It’s usually crime novels and, you know, sex novels, or whatever, for money. (Location 1976)

after I started taking Fridays off to go teach, other people in the building, other editors, began to do the same thing. They said well if she can do it, I can do it! (Location 1982)

I’d start writing early in the morning, when I got up, which was before the sun, because I would always beat the sun. And that would last until lunch. Noon or so. Now that’s like six hours, (Location 2013)

I remember a sentence floating around my head for like, a whole summer, and I didn’t know what it meant, or why was it staying in my head. And then I sat down and wrote it out on a piece of paper, and after I did that, another sentence came. [Laughing] And then another one. You don’t know how it’s gonna happen. (Location 2029)

if you wrote with ink it sounded a little arrogant. Pencil sounded like you knew what you were doing but you were willing to erase. (Location 2041)

there were certain things we were not able to do, and certain places we were not able to go. You know, restaurants, neighborhoods, and so on. But we made our own neighborhood. (Location 2081)

the group that was acceptable were the sort of middle-class, upper-class whites who lived on the shore. They were doctors and dentists, (Location 2088)

I love teaching because you learn so much. It’s not just me telling them, it’s what you get back, which I really like. It’s not just me talking, it’s the conversation, in a sense. (Location 2098)

Three years is the shortest time I’ve spent writing a book. Most of them take six or seven. (Location 2131)

They go into the places that are most hurtful, in their youth or in their neighborhood or in their families, and they pull from that a kind of elegance in terms of their writing. (Location 2201)

My mother was always “better than.” (Location 2233)

elevated language. All novels should be elevated. I don’t want, I don’t like journalistic prose for a novel. (Location 2298)

Caldwell* 6 was a great favorite of mine for years and years and years. (Location 2302)

a really great book over here about him that Woodward* 8 wrote, called Fear. (Location 2329)

James Baldwin (1924– 1987) (Location 2346)

After graduating from Howard University, and getting a master’s at Cornell University, she became an English professor, first at Texas Southern University, then back at Howard. (Location 2359)

HANNAH ARENDT: THE LAST INTERVIEW “There are no dangerous thoughts for the simple reason that thinking itself is such a dangerous enterprise.” (Location 2418)

JAMES BALDWIN: THE LAST INTERVIEW (Location 2427)

GABRIEL GÁRCIA MÁRQUEZ: THE LAST INTERVIEW (Location 2431)

ERNEST HEMINGWAY: THE LAST INTERVIEW “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector.” (Location 2440)

DAVID BOWIE: THE LAST INTERVIEW (Location 2457)

MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.: THE LAST INTERVIEW “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” (Location 2461)

KATHY ACKER: THE LAST INTERVIEW (Location 2479)

JULIA CHILD: THE LAST INTERVIEW (Location 2487)