INTERVIEWER
Do you ever rework passages that have already been published before reading them to an audience?
MORRISON
I don't change it for the audience, but I know what it ought to be and isn't. After twenty-some years you can figure it out; I know more about it now than I did then. It is not so much that it would have been different or even better; it is just that, taken into context with what I was trying to effect, or what consequence I wanted it to have on the reader, years later the picture is clearer to me.
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
Do you ever rework passages that have already been published before reading them to an audience?
MORRISON
I don't change it for the audience, but I know what it ought to be and isn't. After twenty-some years you can figure it out; I know more about it now than I did then. It is not so much that it would have been different or even better; it is just that, taken into context with what I was trying to effect, or what consequence I wanted it to have on the reader, years later the picture is clearer to me.
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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