“When you think about the churches, cathedrals,” she begins, “that’s art – there’s a narrative. Good story. Lovely music. There’s decoration. There’s costume. It’s all there. It’s very impressive. “The pop stuff – it’s – it’s so low. People used to stand around and watch lynchings. And clap and laugh and have picnics. And they used to watch hangings. We don’t do that anymore. But we do watch these other car crashes. “Crashes. Like those Housewives. Do you really think that your life is bigger, deeper, more profound because your life is on television? And they do.” —Toni Morrison in a recent interview.
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“When you think about the churches, cathedrals,” she begins, “that’s art – there’s a narrative. Good story. Lovely music. There’s decoration. There’s costume. It’s all there. It’s very impressive.

“The pop stuff – it’s – it’s so low. People used to stand around and watch lynchings. And clap and laugh and have picnics. And they used to watch hangings. We don’t do that anymore. But we do watch these other car crashes.

“Crashes. Like those Housewives. Do you really think that your life is bigger, deeper, more profound because your life is on television? And they do.”

—Toni Morrison in a recent interview.

“Still, even at 81, sporting both a new novel and a new hip, Morrison is as grand as she’s ever been. When we meet in her many-gabled house in the aptly named village of Grand View-on-Hudson, about 25 miles north of Manhattan, that bountiful woolen hair matches the lower half of a soft, enveloping sweater. Her face is polished in places and fissured in others, like the weathered stone of Mount Rushmore: the first black woman Nobelist, who’s lived long enough to speak to the first black president. Born only two years after Martin Luther King Jr., she’s a great-grandmother of assimilation—and she looks the part.” - Who Is the Author of Toni Morrison? by Boris Kachka
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“Still, even at 81, sporting both a new novel and a new hip, Morrison is as grand as she’s ever been. When we meet in her many-gabled house in the aptly named village of Grand View-on-Hudson, about 25 miles north of Manhattan, that bountiful woolen hair matches the lower half of a soft, enveloping sweater. Her face is polished in places and fissured in others, like the weathered stone of Mount Rushmore: the first black woman Nobelist, who’s lived long enough to speak to the first black president. Born only two years after Martin Luther King Jr., she’s a great-grandmother of assimilation—and she looks the part.”

- Who Is the Author of Toni Morrison? by Boris Kachka

INTERVIEWER

Wouldn’t you rather be known as a great exponent of literature rather than as an African American writer?

MORRISON

It’s very important to me that my work be African American; if it assimilates into a different or larger pool, so much the better. But I shouldn’t be asked to do that. Joyce is not asked to do that. Tolstoy is not. I mean, they can all be Russian, French, Irish or Catholic, they write out of where they come from, and I do too. It just so happens that that space for me is African American; it could be Catholic, it could be Midwestern. I’m those things too, and they are all important.

1993 Paris Review interview with Toni Morrison (via mensahdemary)