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.”
