77 quotes
The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.
Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
You free. Nothing and nobody is obliged to save you but you.
To get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not to need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom.
I always know the ending; that's where I start.
Every Day a Word Surprises Me & Other Quotes by Writers by Phaidon (2018)
There is really nothing more to say — except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
The Bluest Eye (1969)
All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.
Grace Notes (1989)
Refusing to monumentalize, disdaining the final word, precise "summing up", acknowledging their "poor power to add or detract", his words signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns.
Writing to me is an advanced and slow form of reading. If you find a book you really want to read but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it.
There is just a little music, each other and the urgency of what is at stake. Which is all they had. For that work, the work of language is to get out of the way.
I want to see a white man convicted for raping a black woman.
They are in prisons of their own construction: and their ignorance and their stunted emotional growth consistently boggle the mind.
A Humanist View (1975)
You marvel at the economy and this choice of words. How many ways can you describe the sky and the moon? After Sylvia Plath, what can you say?
Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.
Song of Solomon (1977)
Racial ignorance is a prison from which there is no escape because there’re no doors.
A Humanist View (1975)
To the artist one can only say, not to be confused, — not to be confused.
A Humanist View (1975)
The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.
Nobel Prize Lecture (1993)
It is easily the most empty cliché, the most useless word, and at the same time the most powerful human emotion — because hatred is involved in it, too.
On the title of her book Love (2003)
Everywhere, everywhere, children are the scorned people of the earth.
Woman to Woman (1994)