• Tell us what it is to be a woman so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin. What it is to have no home in this place. To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company. (Nobel Lecture, 1993)
• 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.
• I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither.... So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.
• When I write, I don't translate for white readers.... Dostoevski wrote for a Russian audience, but we're able to read him. If I'm specific, and I don't overexplain, then anyone can overhear me.
• When there is pain, there are no words. All pain is the same.
• If there is a book you really want to read but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. (speech)
• What difference do it make if the thing you scared of is real or not? (from Song of Solomon)
• I think women dwell quite a bit on the duress under which they work, on how hard it is just to do it at all. We are traditionally rather proud of ourselves for having slipped creative work in there between the domestic chores and obligations. I'm not sure we deserve such big A-pluses for all that. (from Newsweek interview, 1981)
• If you're going to hold someone down you're going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain. You are confined by your own repression.
• I'm a Midwesterner, and everyone in Ohio is excited. I'm also a New Yorker, and a New Jerseyan, and an American, plus I'm an African-American, and a woman. I know it seems like I'm spreading like algae when I put it this way, but I'd like to think of the prize being distributed to these regions and nations and races. (Nobel Lecture, 1993)
• In Tar Baby, the classic concept of the individual with a solid, coherent identity is eschewed for a model of identity which sees the individual as a kaleidoscope of heterogeneous impulses and desires, constructed from multiple forms of interaction with the world as a play of difference that cannot be completely comprehended.
*Becoming an American is based on an attitude: an exclusion of me.
*Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
*Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it.
*I don't write -ist novels.
*I learned an enormous amount of self-esteem, even though the collapse of the relationship suggested the opposite. I just had to stand up.
*I would solve a lot of literary problems just thinking about a character in the subway, where you can't do anything anyway.
*I'm not entangled in shaping my work according to other people's views of how I should have done it.
*It makes me breathless to be told that this is difficult writing-that nobody in the schools is going to want to talk about all of these issues.
*Make a difference about something other than yourselves.
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