Toni Morrison at Literary Hub:
My stories come to me as clichés. A cliché is a cliché because it’s worthwhile. Otherwise, it would have been discarded. A good cliché can never be overwritten; it’s still mysterious. The concepts of beauty and ugliness are mysterious to me. Many people write about them. In mulling over them, I try to get underneath them and see what they mean, understand the impact they have on what people do. I also write about love and death.
The problem I face as a writer is to make my stories mean something. You can have wonderful, interesting people, a fascinating story, but it’s not about anything. It has no real substance. I can fail in any number of ways when I write, but I want my books to always be about something that is important to me, and the subjects that are important in the world are the same ones that have always been important.
More here.