Image: Toni Morrison, Knopf “Jazz” promotional photograph, 1991

In a 1992 interview for The Paris Review at Princeton University (interview conducted by Elissa Schappell and Claudia Brodsky Lacour), Toni Morrison said this about beauty:

“I think of beauty as an absolute necessity. I don’t think it’s a privilege or an indulgence, it’s not even a quest. I think it’s almost like knowledge, which is to say, it’s what we were born for.”