Art & Creativity Quote by Toni Morrison

The line lands like a dare disguised as advice: stop waiting for permission. Morrison isn’t offering a quaint inspirational poster; she’s naming a structural problem in culture-making. If the book you want doesn’t exist, that absence isn’t neutral. It’s evidence of whose lives have been treated as narratable, marketable, “universal,” and whose have been left to footnotes or stereotypes. The subtext is political without sounding like a manifesto: the canon has gaps, and those gaps have authors.

Morrison’s intent comes from a career spent writing into silences. She entered an American literary landscape that routinely demanded Black characters as symbols, not full interior human beings. Her novels didn’t just add representation; they rewired the terms of literary authority, insisting that Black life could be the default lens rather than the explanatory case study. So “you must write it” is not a leisure activity. It’s an act of cultural self-determination.

The phrase “really want” matters, too. Morrison points toward necessity rather than ambition: the book is already haunting you, pressing at the edge of language. And “must” refuses the soft tyranny of gatekeepers - publishing trends, workshop orthodoxies, the fear of getting it “wrong.” She’s arguing that longing is a form of knowledge. If you can see the missing story clearly enough to crave it, you’re already halfway to being the one responsible for bringing it into the world.