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.)