Toni Morrison has not joined FLAPSS and has not endorsed it. This page is a reference record assembled from published interviews and public remarks. Every answer below is a direct quotation with the source and date shown next to it.
Novelist and editor; Nobel laureate in Literature, 1993
United States · 1931–2019
Novelist and editor whose books include The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon and Beloved. She worked as an editor at Random House, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, and taught at Princeton University.
2 answers 0 followers reference
Writing before dawn began as a necessity—I had small children when I first began to write and I needed to use the time before they said, “Mama”—and that was always around five in the morning. Many years later, after I stopped working at Random House, I just stayed at home for a couple of years. I discovered things about myself I had never thought about before.
Recorded Elissa Schappell, The Paris Review, issue 128, Fall 1993, 1 January 1993 source
I, at first, thought I didn’t have a ritual, but then I remembered that I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark—it must be dark—and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come. And she said, “Well, that’s a ritual.” And I realized that for me this ritual comprises my preparation to enter a space that I can only call nonsecular … For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.
Recorded Elissa Schappell, The Paris Review, issue 128, Fall 1993, 1 January 1993 source
Every quotation above is reproduced from the source shown beside it and has not been edited. Toni Morrison did not write these answers for FLAPSS. Request a correction or removal.