“An unhappy childhood is a treasure for a writer,” says Hilary Mantel in this CBS Saturday Morning interview about her story collection Learning to Talk, which was first published in England in 2003 and published in the U.S. for the first time by Henry Holt this month. The stories feature young characters growing up in mid-twentieth-century England and are inspired by Mantel’s childhood.

“Language alone protects us from the scariness of things with no names.” The life of Nobel laureate and Pulitzer Prize–winning author Toni Morrison is remembered through this 2004 interview for CBS Sunday Morning highlighting what was most important to her: being a mother and a writer. Morrison died at the age of eighty-eight on August 5, 2019.