Toni Morrison Art Quotations

Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.

The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language, so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly, so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Someone says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

Your life is already artful-waiting, just waiting, for you to make it art.

I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence. Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge-even wisdom. Like art.

I am a writer and my faith in the world of art is intense, but not irrational, nor naïve - because art takes us and makes us take a journey beyond price, beyond cost, into bearing witness to the world as it is and as it should be. Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

In a way, her strangeness, her naiveté, her craving for the other half of her equation was the consequence of an idle imagination. Had she paints, or clay, or knew the discipline of the dance, or strings, had she anything to engage her tremendous curiosity and her gift for metaphor, she might have exchanged the restlessness and preoccupation with whim for an activity that provided her with all she yearned for. And like an artist with no art form, she became dangerous.

Like any artist without an art form, she became dangerous.

For me, Art is the restoration of order. It may discuss all sort of terrible things, but there must be satisfaction at the end. A little bit of hunger, but also satisfaction.

There is no civilization that did not begin with art, Whether it was drawing a line in the sand, painting a cave or dancing.

The best art is political and you ought to be able to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably beautiful at the same time.

Black people's music is in a class by itself and always has been. There's nothing like it. The reason for that is because it was not tampered with by white people. It was not on the media. It was not anywhere except where black people were. And it is one of the art forms in which black people decided what is good in it. Nobody told them. What surfaced and what floated to the top, were the giants and the best.

All art is knowing when to stop.

Art invites us to know beauty and to solicit it, summon it, from even the most tragic of circumstances.

You need intelligence, and you need to look. You need a gaze, a wide gaze, penetrating and roving - thats what's useful for art.

From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as something artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art.