INTERVIEWER
Style is obviously important to you. Can you talk about this in relation to Jazz?
MORRISON
[excerpted from her answer] ...You must practice thrift in order to achieve that luxurious quality of wastefulness – that sense that you have enough to waste, that you are holding back – without actually wasting anything. You shouldn't overgratify, you should never satiate. I've always felt that that peculiar sense of hunger at the end of a piece of art – a yearning for more – is really very, very powerful. But there is at the same time a kind of contentment, knowing that at some other time there will indeed be more because the artist is endlessly inventive.
Toni Morrison: The Art of Fiction No. 134, Interviewed by Elissa Schappell, with additional material from Claudia Brodsky Lacour in Women at Work: Interviews from the Paris Review
Style is obviously important to you. Can you talk about this in relation to Jazz?
MORRISON
[excerpted from her answer] ...You must practice thrift in order to achieve that luxurious quality of wastefulness – that sense that you have enough to waste, that you are holding back – without actually wasting anything. You shouldn't overgratify, you should never satiate. I've always felt that that peculiar sense of hunger at the end of a piece of art – a yearning for more – is really very, very powerful. But there is at the same time a kind of contentment, knowing that at some other time there will indeed be more because the artist is endlessly inventive.
Toni Morrison: The Art of Fiction No. 134, Interviewed by Elissa Schappell, with additional material from Claudia Brodsky Lacour in Women at Work: Interviews from the Paris Review
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