Toni Morrison

I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.

You need a whole community to raise a child. I have raised two children, alone.

As you enter positions of trust and power, dream a little before you think.

Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.

My children are delightful people, whom I would love even if they weren't my children.

The body is ready to have babies. Nature wants it done then, when the body can handle it, not after 40, when the income can handle it.

The unflattering reviews are painful for short periods of time; the badly written ones are deeply, deeply insulting. That reviewer took no time to really read the book.

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.

Schools must stop being holding pens to keep energetic young people off the job market and off the streets. We stretch puberty out a long, long time.

I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.

I get angry about things, then go on and work.

I merged those two words, black and feminist, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes.