Toni Morrison Says

"Critics generally don't associate black people with ideas. They see marginal people...sociologically interesting people perhaps, but very parochial....We are people, not aliens. We live, we love, and we die."

"Black people have a story, and that story has to be heard. There was an articulate literature before there was a print. There were griots. They memorized it. People heard it. It is important that there is sound in my books--that you can hear it, that I can hear it."

-- From Conversations with Toni Morrison (1994), University Press of Mississippi