MD > MD's Quotes

“I think long and carefully about what novels ought to do. They should clarify the roles that have become obscured; they ought to identify those things in the past that are useful and those things that are not; and they ought to give nourishment.”
― Toni Morrison

“We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
― Toni Morrison

“I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don't know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That's what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say 'people,' that's what I mean.”
― Toni Morrison

“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

“Sometimes you have to take the whole concept of Art and throw it out on its whore ass.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Sell them their dreams,' a woman radio announcer urged a convention of display men in 1923. 'Sell them what they longed for and hoped for and almost despaired of having. Sell them hats by splashing sunlight across them. Sell them dreams – dreams of country clubs and proms and visions of what might happen if only. After all, people don’t buy things to have things. They buy things to work for them. They buy hope – hope of what your merchandise will do for them. Sell them this hope and you won’t have to worry about selling them goods.”
― William R. Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture

“Write. No amount of self-inflicted misery, altered states, black pullovers or being publicly obnoxious will ever add up to your being a writer. Writers write. On you go.”
― A.L. Kennedy

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage.”
― Anais Nin

“No subject is terrible if the story is true, if the prose is clean and honest, and if it affirms courage and grace under pressure.”
― Ernest Hemingway