You need intelligence, and you need to look. You need a gaze, a wide gaze, penetrating and roving — that’s what’s useful for art.

More from Toni Morrison

• Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty.
• If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.
• If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.
• In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.
• There is really nothing more to say — except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how.
• Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can’t nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.