Toni Morrison Talks To Google About Creativity

By HILLEL ITALIE, Associated Press

Novelist Toni Morrison, speaking Wednesday to dozens of Google employees holding laptops and smartphones, shared her vision for how she would turn the search engine leader into a literary character.

“It’s like a big, metal, claw-y machine in `Transformers,'” she said, to much laughter, during a lunchtime gathering at Google’s Manhattan offices. “When they’re threatened, they turn into a little radio, they turn into a little car. And then after you pass them by they come up again.

“They can be anything and everything.”

The 82-year-old Nobel laureate was the latest, and most literary in memory, of a long line of famous guests from Stephen Colbert to Lady Gaga who since 2005 have dropped in on Google Inc. in New York and the home offices in Mountain View, Calif. After her talk, she stayed on to take questions online, part of Google’s “Hangout” series.

Morrison, battling the flu and sniffling through much of the afternoon, was promoting the paperback edition of her novel “Home,” published last year. But she also chatted about technology, teaching and creativity.

[…]

Morrison, an early endorser of Amazon.com’s Kindle reading device and the author of prize winners including “Song of Solomon,” said she’s not a Luddite and does keep up with the Internet, enough so that she much prefers the nonfiction she reads on blogs to fiction. And she credited the Internet as an information resource.

[…]

She cited an example from her most recent novel, set in the 1950s.

“I was looking for documentation for who could not rent or buy property in Seattle,” she said. “And I knew black people couldn’t, but I didn’t have any real examples. But via Google I went through stuff and found these lease arrangements.”

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The author was commemorated with a stamp.

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