A conversation between writers Toni Morrison and Ntozake Shange in which Baldwin is mentioned part way through the interview when Shange asks Morrison about the role of anger in her work: "In an interview with Melvyn Bragg on the Southbank Show in London, I believe he asked you a question: were you ever seriously tempted to let loose, like Baldwin has? Do you try to shelve it?"

Morrison replies: "Anger is not an artistic feeling, that’s not what my writing is for….my anger is much more direct in my life, but I don’t need a way to show it. Art is not therapeutic for me, I don’t need to express it in that way. It’s bigger than that, much bigger than that. The characters in the book can show what ever they are: some of them are furious; some of them are not; some of them are rather sweet and abiding and some of them are not. But I try to make them whoever they are. I could never write out of that place. James Baldwin can because he is very cold, his mode his very cold. He can control his anger and convert it into an art form so that it looks extremely passionate, but it is very well controlled. He feeds it to you, and there’s this coolness about it, it’s never harangue in that sense, but I think that’s because he writes a lot of non-fiction. In his fiction sometime it’s harder to control, when the characters are jumping up and down, you know they are slippery. But when he writes non-fiction he has to appear along that line. I wouldn’t trust anger a motivating force for any book I wrote. I wouldn’t trust it."