I don't want you to write about what you know, because you don't know anything. I don't want to hear about your boyfriend or your grandma... I'm getting a little tired of 'my life story as fiction'. Please don't tell me about your little life - is there nothing larger? More important?
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of exploring deeper themes and broader ideas rather than focusing solely on personal narratives.
Toni Morrison’s quote critiques the tendency to center personal experiences in storytelling when there are larger, more significant issues at play. She is urging writers and thinkers to transcend their own life stories in order to address broader societal themes and questions that resonate on a larger scale, promoting a narrative that seeks to make a impactful contribution beyond individual experiences.
In practice
During a writing workshop to encourage participants to think beyond their own experiences.
There is a certain kind of peace that is not merely the absence of war. It is larger than that. The peace I am thinking of is not at the mercy of history's rule, nor is it a passive surrender to the status quo. The peace I am thinking of is the dance of an open mind when it engages another equally open one -- an activity that occurs most naturally, most often in the reading/writing world we live in. Accessible as it is, this particular kind of peace warrants vigilance.
You looking good." "Devil's confusion. He lets me look good long as I feel bad.
What do you say? There really are no words for that. There really aren't. Somebody tries to say, 'I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.' People say that to me. There's no language for it. Sorry doesn't do it. I think you should just hug people and mop their floor or something.
An innocent man is a sin before God. Inhuman and therefore untrustworthy. No man should live without absorbing the sins of his kind, the foul air of his innocence, even if it did wilt rows of angel trumpets and cause them to fall from their vines.
Like friendship, hatred needed more than physical intimacy; it wanted creativity and hard work to sustain itself
One of my kids was born in 1968. There were going to be political difficulties, but they were never going to have that level of hatred and contempt that my brothers and my sister and myself were exposed to.
If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know.
Chaplin and Keaton are still the best. They know that there is nothing more serious than laughter, an art demanding infinite work, and that as long as the world revolves, making others laugh is the most splendid of activities.
Consulting the rules of composition before taking a photograph, is like consulting the laws of gravity before going for a walk.
As I started writing about loss and grief, I was taking what felt unmanageable and using my songwriting, my sense of poetry and discipline, to try and make it manageable.
I didn't want to write for pay. I wanted to be paid for what I write.
The writer's duty is to keep on writing.
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