Art as a form of survival

We need art to live fully and to grow healthy. Without it we are dry husks drifting aimlessly on every ill wind, our futures without promise and our present without grace.

(Maya Angelou, "Art for the Sake of the Soul," in Even the Stars Look Lonesome, p.133)

Unfavorable conditions for a writer

When a woman was liable, as she was in the fifteenth century, to be beaten and flung about the room if she did not marry the man of her parents' choice, the spiritual atmosphere was not favourable to the production of works of art.

(Virginia Woolf, in "Women and Fiction," in Women and Writing, p. 45)

Creating art with limited moments of solitude

I have made for myself the following credo: it is perhaps true that a mind freed of care creates the "best" art. But I do not strive to create "good" art; I simply strive to continue creating.

--Katherine Smith, "The Artist as Single Mother," reprinted in Sleeping with One Eye Open, p. 94.

The body as writing paper

"I learnt to write when I was almost six and at the same time also discovered the magic of my own body as a writing surface....

"We felt the words in gradual bursts of pain, the first words we had written would become less felt, the pain of that scratching now faded, and the last words where we had dug too deep would be pulsating still, unable to be quiet."

(from "Writing Near the Bone" by Yvonne Vera, in Women Writing Africa: Volume 1: The Southern Region)