Quotes About Writing

I am really Chloe Anthony Wofford. That's who I am. I have been writing under this other person's name. I write some things now as Chloe Wofford, private things. I regret having called myself Toni Morrison when I published my first novel, The Bluest Eye .

I think some aspects of writing can be taught. Obviously, you can't teach vision or talent. But you can help with comfort.

Write at the edges of the day.

If writing is thinking and discovery and selection and order and meaning, it is also awe and reverence and mystery and magic....Authors arrive at text and subtext in thousands of ways, learning each time they begin anew how to recognize a valuable idea and how to reader the texture that accompanies, reveals or displays it to its best advantage.

The Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to a writer in terms of how it affects your contracts, the publishers, and the seriousness with which your work is taken. On the other hand, it does interfere with your private life, or it can if you let it, and it has zero effect on the writing.It doesn't help you write better and if you let it, it will intimidate you about future projects.

A writer's life and work are not a gift to humankind; they are its necessity.

All narrative begins for me as listening. When I read, I listen. When I write, I listen—for silence, inflection, rhythm, rest.

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

Writing of, about, and within a world committed to racial dominances without employing the linguistic strategies that supported it seemed to me the most urgent, fruitful, challenging work a writer could take on.

The only way to own what I know is to write it and let you read it

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

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

Everything I write for the first time is written with a pencil.

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.

The writing is — I'm free from pain. It's the place where I live; it's where I have control; it's where nobody tells me what to do; it's where my imagination is fecund and I am really at my best. Nothing matters more in the world or in my body or anywhere when I'm writing.

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

But the important thing is that I don't do anything else. I avoid social life normally associated with publishing. I don't go to the cocktail parties, I don't give or go to dinner parties. I need that time in the evening because I can do a tremendous amount of work then. And I can concentrate. When I sit down to write I never brood. I have so many other things to do, with my children and teaching, that I can't afford it...

Writing for me is thinking, and it's also a way to position myself in the world, particularly when I don't like what's going on. It's extremely important to me. ... I knew I always was compelled to do it, but I didn't know how essential it was to me.

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

Si hay un libro que te gustaría leer pero aún no se ha escrito, entonces debes escribirlo.

My whole education was to make sure I didn't believe things like that. I dismissed all sorts of things that were indigenous in my family -- superstition and discredited information, and that discredited way of knowing that discredited people always have. But when I began to write, that was the place where I had to go. That's where the information was.

All I can do is read books and write books and edit books and critique books." —Toni Morrison

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

The only way to own what I know is to write it and let you read what I write