This blog is on vacation

No new quotes are being added to this blog over the summer. Perhaps we (really, I) will come back in the fall, refreshed and ready to go. Or perhaps, more likely, we'll/I'll stop this blog at its current number of 55 quotes. (I had hoped to reach 100 quotes). 

For more about this, see: the June 23rd posting at my other blog, Writing Home.

The pleasure of prose

At the time of writing, I don't write for my friends or myself, either; I write for it, for the pleasure of it. I believe if I stopped to wonder what So-and-so would think, or what I'd feel like if this were read by a stranger, I would be paralyzed. I care what my friends think, very deeply—and it's only after they've read the finished thing that I really can rest, deep down.

--Eudora Welty, interviewed in Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, p. 162. (1972)

Why Dorothy Parker was a writer

All those writers who write about their childhood! Gentle God, if I wrote about mine you wouldn't sit in the same room with me.

INTERVIEWER: What, then, would you say is the source of most of your work?

PARKER: Need of money, dear.

--Dorothy Parker, interviewed in Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews, p. 109. (1956)

The dichotomy of the artist and lover

This dichotomizing of the two aspects of female energy, caretaking versus generative action, has been the dominant impact of the cultural narrative about love. We have thought of ourselves either as ... lover or artist—but rarely both. Rarely do assume that the same process involved in creating must inform our loving, or that in loving we create. Rarely would we assume the agency to create, because to have agency means the quality of moving or exerting power, the state of being in action, and as women this has not been our common sense of ourselves.

--Claudia Bepko and Jo-Ann Krestan, Singing at the Top of Our Lungs: Women, Love, and Creativity, p. 25.

What about the ovarian idea?

The animus is the deposit, as it were, of all woman's ancestral experiences of man — and not only that, he is also a creative and procreative being, not in the sense of masculine creativity, but in the sense that he brings forth something we might call the the spermatic word. Just as a man brings forth his work as a complete creation out of his inner feminine nature, so the inner masculine side of a woman brings forth creative seeds which have the power to fertilize the feminine side of the man.

-- Carl G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, p. 209.

Maybe they just needed to get their hair out of their eyes

It seems that women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization; there is, however, one technique which they may have invented—that of plaiting and weaving. If that is so, we should be tempted to guess the unconscious motive for the achievement.

--Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, p. 164.

Naturally exuding creativity

Just as we are born with hundreds of thousands more eggs than we will ever use, we also have far more creative ideas than we will ever be able to bring into being. Some of these eggs and ideas are destined to take root and grow if we're willing to fertilize and support them. Others end in miscarriage or stillbirth. This is not a sign of failure. Nor is it a design flaw. Instead, this process simply reflects the adaptability of Nature, a force that keeps creating and experimenting with form and function in a variety of changing environments. When one thing doesn't work, she tries another, and just keeps sending out more eggs, sperms, seed pods—and ideas!

--Christiane Northrup, "Defining and Refining Our Purpose and Passion," in Mother-Daughter Wisdom, p. 42.

The fury of words

I was lying on the grass ... reading William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. ... Suddenly in the middle of a passage, the power of the words rose up and whacked me on the forehead. I felt the earth move as if a huge safe were being swiveled open and afterwards felt flushed and stunned as you are after sex. I'd had this reaction before—to other books, and to music and painting, but this time as I stared at the light—green blades of grass in front of me, vibrating, I was aware that it was the writer who had done something to me. And I thought, I'd like to do that to someone back.

--Susan Minot, “A Real-Life Education,” in The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work, p. 50.

The woman artist as inner-critic

Why have we not had more female writers, painters, scientists, sculptors, or artists. One explanation offered is that many women do not perceive themselves as creators, follow their interests into career preparation, or place importance on the works they produce. Moreover, the problem may be further exacerbated even when a women produces an original, creative work of art, as some researchers have found that women are more conscious of criticism and find it more difficult to deal with negative perceptions of their work.

--Sally M. Reis, "Women and Creativity," in Encyclopedia of Creativity, edited by Mark A. Runco and Steven R. Pritzker, p. 701.

She's no lady, she's Madonna

I'm a perfectionist. and I'm under lots of pressure. Sometimes you have to be a bitch to get things done. I can be something of a tyrant. In a working situation. Well, in a living situation too.

Madonna, quoted in the chapter, "Fame and Power," in Madonna: The Style Book, by Debbi Voller, p. 82.

She's a lady...

And most male music — not all of it but the good stuff — really lays it on you. It really puts you against the wall and that's what I'd like to do. I'd like my music to intrude. Not many females succeed with that. I identify more with male musicians than female musicians because I tend to think of female musicians as ... ah ... females.

--Kate Bush, interviewed in the book, She's a Rebel By Gillian G. Gaar, p. 223.

The double life of the writer

I wrote out of desperation. In the great turmoil and gloom and euphoria of adolescence, I found there was nowhere to express the chaos of emotions I was feeling, nowhere but in words. I began to rely so much on writing that I was living a double life—one in the world and one on the page. The one on the page was more intense, more satisfying and for a long time much more real.

--Susan Minot, “A Real-Life Education,” in The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work, p. 50.

Language as a spiritual adventure

My love of writing grew out of my love of reading, with which my very life is identified. I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, meditated nature. Telling stories, choosing an appropriate language with which to express each story: This seems to me quintessentially human, one of the great adventures of our species.

(Joyce Carol Oates, "The Importance of Childhood," in The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work, p. 12)

A billion reasons to be happy

I would like to be remembered for my books, especially for my novels, through which I have tried to give morality, beauty and love to the world. I have written at the moment 723 books all together and have sold approximately one billion....I am very thrilled by what I have achieved in my life, and I hope I have helped a great number of people to find love. What really matters, however, is that I do bring happiness to people...

--Dame Barbara Cartland, "How I Want to Be Remembered," in Chicken Soup for the Writer's Soul, p. 341, 344

Writing in the wilderness

What first stuns the young writer emerging from college is that there is no clear-cut road for him to travel on. He must chop a path in the wilderness of his own soul; a disheartening process, lifelong and lonesome.

--Flannery O'Connor, 1948 (quoted in "A Good Writer Is Hard to Find," by Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post, Feb. 22, 2009.)

The sudden inspiration to write

How is it that I became a writer?... It simply happened, suddenly, in 1956, while I was crossing the football field on the way home from school. I wrote a poem in my head and then I wrote it down, and after that, writing was the only thing I wanted to do....

My transition from not being a writer to being one was instantaneous, like the change from docile bank clerk to fanged monster in B movies. Anyone looking might have thought I'd been exposed to some chemical or cosmic ray of the kind that causes rats to become gigantic or men to become invisible.

--Margaret Atwood, "A Path Taken, with All the Certainty of Youth"  in Writers on Writing: More Collected Essays from the New York Times, edited by Jane Smiley, p. 9.

Writing to experience the world

Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.

--Joan Didion, "Why I Write," The New York Times Magazine, December 5, 1976.

The reader, by gender

I think it's far rarer for women to ask men to read their stuff than it is for men to ask women to read their stuff.  Poor Condi Rice couldn't even get George W. Bush to read her presentation of his foreign policy goals in Foreign Affairs magazine during his 2000 campaign.

(Maureen Dowd, Are Men Necessary?, p. 50.)

Writing in the quiet, the void

I feel strongly that one cannot have a family, even a nontraditional one, and be a committed artist without tremendous struggle — a tremendous giving of one's self. ... I believe doing it all, trying to do it all, is a trap women fall into. Why do it all!!!! Then one is running around like a chicken with its head cut off accomplishing things. But what of the quiet moments—the necessary leisure to just experience without structure — Life. If you try to do it all that is gone.

(Bell Hooks, "Black Woman Artist Becoming," in Life Notes: Personal Writings by Contemporary Black Women, edited by Patricia Bell-Scott, p. 152.)

Time ran out

"I just haven't felt to have any identity under the steamroller of decisions and responsibilities of this last half year, with the babies a constant demand....

"It is the starting from scratch that is so hard—this first year. And then if, I keep thinking, if only I could have some windfall, like doing a really successful novel, and buy this house, this ghastly vision of rent bleeding away year after year would vanish.... How I would like to be self-supporting on my writing! But I need time."

(from Letters Home by Sylvia Plath, edited by Aurelia Schober Plath, p. 495; letter written on Jan. 16, 1963--Plath killed herself on Feb. 11.)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

The courage to speak

Our histories, our experiences call to us, always speaking our truths in a deep and resonant voice; they ask us only to listen. When women have the courage to write their stories, to write their truths, to address their silences—only then can their authentic journeys begin.

(Janet Lynn Roseman, "On Writing Women's Autobiography" in The Way of the Woman Writer, (Second edition), p. 13.)

The lady as novelist

For all this, the part-playful, part-hostile nineteenth-century distinction of women writers as 'lady novelists' has stayed very much alive. Consciousness of sex difference is as marked as ever it was. The distinction, however, has become hallowed as 'writers' and 'women writers', the phrase still operating to confine creative women to a pejorative subsection of the real thing, the great world of literature.

(from The Female Form: Women Writers and the Conquest of the Novel by Rosalind Miles, 1987, p. 7)