The children - I call them children when they're under 18 - are hungry for that love. The drugs are just a sleep that you can't even wake up from, because you might remember what you did when you were there. There's no place for them - there should be a rehabilitation center on every corner, along with McDonald's and the banks. This is serious business. The waiting lists are incredible. I mean, it's terrible. It's really terrible.
Toni MorrisonEvil is just sort of ultimately boring. The good thing is just complicated. It's more provocative to me and more stimulating to me.
Toni MorrisonIf you take racism away from certain people - I mean, vitriolic racism as well as the sort of social racist - if you take that away, they may have to face something really terrible, misery, self-misery, and deep pain about who they are.
Toni MorrisonIt's been mentioned or suggested that Paradise will not be well studied, because it's about this unimportant intellectual topic, which is religion.
Toni MorrisonEverything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.
Toni MorrisonI lived in a little working-class town that had no black neighborhoods at all - one high school. We all played together. Everybody was either somebody from the South or an immigrant from East Europe or from Mexico. And there was one church, and there were four elementary schools. And we were all, pretty much until the end of the war, very, very poor.
Toni Morrison