Toni Morrison: Clichés Live On for a Reason

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Image by AJS1 from Pixabay

In an excerpt from an interview included in Black Women Writers at Work, Toni Morrison discusses how to work with and reimagine clichés. “A cliché is a cliché because it’s worthwhile,” she says. “Otherwise, it would have been discarded. A good cliché can never be overwritten; it’s still mysterious. The concepts of beauty and ugliness are mysterious to me. Many people write about them. In mulling over them, I try to get underneath them and see what they mean, understand the impact they have on what people do. I also write about love and death.”