A Quote by Toni Morrison
The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, writers.
Related Quotes
There's a double standard between writers and readers. Readers can be unfaithful to writers anytime they like, but writers must never ever be unfaithful to the readers.
While I admire writers who are able to write with a vitality based on order and action, I work in a different vein. I often feel that if I can get the language just right, the language hypnotizes the reader.
The choosing among words is made by every user of the language, and not exclusively by professional speakers and writers.
Writers are outsiders, and usually not by their own choosing. It’s why they’re writers. If they didn’t feel alienated from human experience, they wouldn’t feel so drawn to writing to make sense of their lives. It’s not the outsider’s facility for language that makes her a writer — many a student body president or homecoming queen can turn a phrase — but her ability to howl at the moon, on the page.
I have a total responsibility to the reader. The reader has to trust me and never feel betrayed. There's a double standard between writers and readers. Readers can be unfaithful to writers anytime they like, but writers must never ever be unfaithful to the readers. And it's appropriate, because the writer is getting paid and the reader isn't.
Above all, translators must be native speakers. It’s not because they speak the language better – I understand that sometimes a foreigner can learn a language better than native speakers. It has more to do with intimate knowledge of the society for which the book is being translated.
And the truth is that if a writer is successful, you gain readers. It benefits all the writers. It's important for all the writers that as many of us as possible be successful.
Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.
The symbiotic relationship between reading and writing is a cornerstone of our individual intellectual journey and our educational system. We write as an act of self-expression. We read because language renders unto us the vitality of real and imagined experience.
Books can truly change our lives: the lives of those who read them, the lives of those who write them. Readers and writers alike discover things they never knew about the world and about themselves.
If you don't uphold your legal responsibility to enforce the First Amendment, to provide speakers with platforms and audiences with safe, the ability to listen to speakers of all different kinds, agnostic ideology, if you don't do that as a university, you are not performing your essential function.
Language is not a genetic gift, it is a social gift. Learning a new language is becoming a member of the club -the community of speakers of that language.
We live in a world filled with language. Language imparts identity, meaning, and perspective to our human community. Writers are either polluters or part of the clean-up team. Just as the language of power and greed has the potential to destroy us, the language of reason and empathy has the power to save us. Writers can inspire a kinder, fairer, more beautiful world, or invite selfishness, stereotyping, and violence. Writers can unite people or divide them.
What I take from writers I like is their economy - the ability to use language to very effective ends. The ability to have somebody read something and see it, or for somebody to paint an entire landscape of visual imagery with just sheets of words - that's magical.
Language is possible due to a number of cognitive and physical characteristics that are unique to humans but none of which that are unique to language. Coming together they make language possible. But the fundamental building block of language is community.
Confessionalism relates to writers of color. I think confessional poetry is in its way very Catholic, capital C. One of the formative ideas of Confessionalism, beyond psychoanalysis, is a very actual fall from grace. And, at least in America, people of color never occupy that position of grace the way that white people do. So I think that in some very actual ways the confessional mode, strictly speaking, is not possible for non-white writers.
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