I always get up and make a cup of coffee while it is still dark—it must be dark—and then I drink the coffee and watch the light come.... Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit, or where they engage in this mysterious process. For me, light is the signal in the transition. It’s not being in the light, it’s being there before it arrives. It enables me, in some sense.

    - Toni Morrison, excerpted from Art As a Way of Life