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.