Quotes About Creative Women

This blog is on vacation

2009-06-23T10:00:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-26T05:33:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-21T08:36:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-04T08:10:00.000-07:00

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?

2009-04-29T07:57:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-20T09:26:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-15T06:27:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-09T12:31:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-01T11:46:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-26T08:39:00.001-07:00

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...

2009-03-19T11:34:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-10T11:23:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-03T12:07:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-26T06:45:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-24T08:11:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-17T10:11:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-12T12:02:00.000-08:00

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

2009-02-09T09:46:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-27T05:34:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-16T09:44:00.000-08:00

"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

2009-01-13T10:27:00.000-08:00

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

2009-01-06T06:12:00.000-08:00

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)

A life of thought

2008-12-30T08:15:00.000-08:00

How do most people live without any thoughts? There are many people in the world, — you must have noticed them in the street, — how do they live? How do they get strength to put on their clothes in the morning?

If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way?

(from Letter to Colonel T. W. Higginson written by Emily Dickinson, 1870; reprinted in The Life and Letters of Emily Dickinson, edited by Martha Dickinson Bianchi, p. 276)

Art from the chaos

2008-12-23T11:17:00.000-08:00

“...what makes me feel as though I belong here out in this world is not the teacher, not the mother, not the lover, but what goes on in my mind when I am writing. Then I belong here and then all of the things that are disparate and irreconcilable can be useful. I can do the traditional things that writers always say they do, which is to make order out of chaos. Even if you are reproducing disorder, you are sovereign at this point. Struggling through the work is extremely important—more important to me than publishing it."

(If you didn't do this...?)

"Then I would be part of the chaos."

--from “Toni Morrison, The Art of Fiction,” (Interview with Toni Morrison, 1993) in The Paris Review Interviews, II, p. 366.

Finding a wrinkle in time through art

2008-12-18T11:02:00.000-08:00

When we are self-conscious, we cannot be wholly aware; we must throw ourselves out first. This throwing ourselves away is the act of creativity. So, when we wholly concentrate, like a child in play, or an artist at work, then we share in the act of creating. We not only escape time, we also escape our self-conscious selves.

(Madeleine L'Engle, A Circle of Quiet, p. 11)

Words that didn't go away

2008-12-16T10:30:00.000-08:00

That all my dreams might not prove empty, I have been writing this useless account—though I doubt it will long survive me.

(Lady Nijō, c. 1307, The Confessions of Lady Nijō; translated by Karen Brazell, Stanford University Press, 1976, p. 264.)

The loneliness of the solo artist

2008-12-11T11:08:00.000-08:00

I also think that process by which you become a writer is a pretty lonely one. We don't have a group apprenticeship like a violinist might training for an orchestra, or a ballet student might being in a company that does ballets. We don't have any of that. We write on our own time, we write when we can.

Anne Rice, from A Fan's Interview with Anne Rice, The Borzoi Reader Online.

Why make the effort?

2008-12-09T08:02:00.000-08:00

Very few people possess true artistic ability. It is therefore both unseemly and unproductive to irritate the situation by making an effort. If you have a burning, restless urge to write or paint, simply eat something sweet and the feeling will pass.

(Note: This is an oft-mentioned quote from Fran Lebowitz, but I haven't been able to find the exact source yet; will add later).

The lost words of women

2008-12-02T09:31:00.000-08:00

I believe that every line a woman writes announces her. Perhaps it is that very fear of announcing herself that summons her to begin writing and causes her to halt in her tracks before nary a word is penned.

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

Art as a form of survival

2008-11-25T07:00:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-18T09:48:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-11T06:26:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-04T08:33:00.000-08:00

"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)

Making time to write--by losing sleep

2008-10-29T19:31:00.000-07:00

"Empowerment is what the emerging artist needs to win for herself. And the initial sense of urgency to create can easily be dissipated because it entails making the one choice many people, especially women, in our society with its emphasis on the 'acceptable' priorities, feel selfish about making: taking the time to create, stealing it from yourself if it's the only way."

-- "5:00 A.M.: Writing as Ritual" in The Latin Deli by Judith Ortiz Cofer, p. 168 (reprinted in Sleeping With One Eye Open)

The whispers of grandmothers

2008-10-21T10:44:00.000-07:00

"You remember thinking while braiding your hair that you look a lot like your mother and her mother before her. It was their whispers that pushed you, their murmurs over pots sizzling in your head. A thousand women urging you to speak through the blunt tip of your pencil."

(from "Women Like Us" by Edwidge Danticat, reprinted in reprinted in Word. On Being a Woman Writer, 2004.).

Not having it all

2008-10-14T10:34:00.000-07:00

"Children. There's the rub; I accept that childlessness might become the price I pay for my decision to become a writer.... I do not believe that I can 'have it all'— that is, that I can be effective both as a mother and as a writer."

(from "Earning Virginia Woolf's Room" by Eileen Tabios, included in the anthology, Sleeping with One Eye Open, edited by Marilyn Kallet and Judith Ortiz Cofer, 1999).

Birthing creativity

2008-10-09T18:46:00.001-07:00

"There's so much that I don't want to die with. Not sharin it with somebody. That's what give me the idea to do a book because I have so much experience in here that I want to explode."

(from Motherwit: An Alabama Midwife's Story by Onnie Lee Logan, Katherine Clark, 1989; excerpted in The Norton Book of Women's Lives, edited by Phyllis Rose, 1993)

The heartbreak of the tenderness of being

2008-10-07T10:17:00.000-07:00

"The stuff I need for singing by whatever means is garnered from every thought, every heart that ever pounded the earth, the intelligence that directs the stars. The shapes of mountains, cities, a whistle leaf of grass, or a human bent with loss will revise the pattern of the story, the song. I take it from there, write or play through the heartbreak of the tenderness of being until I am the sky, the earth, the song and the singer."

(from "Finding the Groove" by Joy Harjo, reprinted in Word. On Being a Woman Writer, 2004.).

There is no essential truth about being a female writer

2008-10-03T20:22:00.000-07:00

"There is no essential truth about being a female writer. The best writing comes from the boundaries, the ungendered spaces between male and female.....

"I like to think of writing in limitless terms, with no particular contract with the reader, especially that of gender. When I have discovered that unmarked and fearless territory then I am free to write, even more free to be a woman writing. Sometimes the light coming through my window has been much more important than the fact that I am a woman writing."

(from "Writing Near the Bone" by Yvonne Vera, in Women Writing Africa: Volume 1: The Southern Region, p. 488-)

--Submitted by Beth Blevins.

Writing in a magic house

2008-09-30T12:09:00.000-07:00

"No one tried to dissuade me from writing; they simply talked about what I would do to make a living. Writing, in their eyes, could be done when one came home from work. It was not that they did not respect writing. It was that they saw it as having nothing to do with real life... I was not at all interested in making a living. I thought then that my destiny could be just like Emily Dickinson's. I could stay alone in my little house and write. Of course as a young girl believing in magic I did not think in concrete terms about how I would acquire the house, the means to survive. I thought it would happen like magic. I let no one dissuade me from my dream of becoming a writer."

(from Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, by bell hooks)

Life in the margins

2008-09-26T11:51:00.000-07:00

"The mathematics of our lives, the practice runs that make up what we offer the public as real, are proven in the margins. We whisper there, perfecting what we want others to hear, often editing out truth. And yes, we dream there... Women writers have practiced our craft from the outskirts. Our lenses have been aimed at the public spaces which have marginalized our voices....To find ourselves we hold up a mirror to the worlds we all inhabit."

(from "Foreword: From the Margin to the Page" by Suheir Hammad, in Word. On Being a [Woman] Writer, edited by Jocelyn Burrell)

--Submitted by Beth Blevins.

To not be forgotten

2008-09-23T11:14:00.000-07:00

"I will and bequeath this book after my husband and myself are through with it, to my oldest grandson Bertie Williams....I trust what is worthy of emulation he may profit by.

"It is of more value to me than it could possibly be to my children, but I desire that it shall be kept in the family and treasured as a relic of by-gone days, not from any especial merit it possesses, but because I do not want to be forgotten."

(from Mollie: The Journal of Mollie Dorsey Sanford in Nebraska and Colorado Territories, 1857-1866, by Mollie Dorsey Sanford, U of Nebraska Press, 2003. p. xx).

Kicking the door off the hinges

2008-09-19T20:06:00.000-07:00

"I had sworn my love to Graham (Nash) in a way that I didn't think was possible for myself. And he wanted me to marry him. I had agreed to it. And then I just started thinking. My grandmother was a frustrated poet and musician, she kicked the kitchen door off the hinges, on the farm. I thought about my paternal grandmother who wept for the last time in her life at 14, behind some barn because she wanted a piano, and said, 'Dry your eyes, you silly girl, you'll never have a piano.'

"And I thought, maybe I'm the one that got the gene that has to make it happen for these two women. As much as I loved and cared for Graham, I thought, I'm going to end up like my grandmother, kicking the door off the hinges. And it's like, I better not. And it broke my heart."

(Joni Mitchell, speaking in the documentary, Joni Mitchell: Woman of Heart and Mind, part of the American Masters series on PBS; 2003.)

--Transcribed by Beth Blevins.

A dog's life

2008-09-16T08:50:00.000-07:00

"Every dispassionate investigator of the subject has agreed that woman's comparative lack of accomplishment cannot be entirely due to her not having enjoyed such opportunities, as in music, the arts, philosophy, spiritual leadership, invention, and science; yet until recently their accomplishments in these fields have been far from startling. Why have there been so few outstanding representatives of the female sex in these fields? There are many reasons....

"The truth is that if it is continually being reiterated that the individual belongs to a group that has never achieved anything and never will, and that everything ever achieved in the world has been accomplished by persons of another kind;... if you make laws to prevent her from owning property as well as laws that assign her to an inferior position in the hierarchy of statuses; if you exclude her from all activities except those limited to the menial tasks of domesticity and executing the will of her superior in looking after children; and if you conduct yourself as if you were her natural lord and master, you will succeed, have no doubt of it, in convincing her that such is the natural order of things. You may, in fact, succeed to such an extent as to engender a doglike fidelity and an utter devotion to the principle that dog is dog and master is master, each occupying the station to which God and nature have called them."

(from “Women and Creativity” in The Natural Superiority of Women, Fifth Edition, 1999 by Ashley Montagu [original edition published in 1953]; p. 204)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

On the absence of female writers as literary characters

2008-09-09T07:21:00.000-07:00

"(T)he girl or woman who tries write...goes to poetry or fiction looking for her way of being in the world, since she has been putting words and images together; she is looking eagerly for guides, maps, possibilities; and over and over...she comes up against something that negates everything she is about: she meets the image of Woman in books written by men. She finds a terror and a dream, she finds a beautiful pale face, she finds La Belle Dame Sans Merci, she finds Juliet or Tess or Salome, but precisely what she does not find is that absorbed, drudging, puzzled, sometimes inspired creature, herself, who sits at a desk trying to put words together."

(from "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision" in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence by Adrienne Rich, p.39)

The path of writing

2008-09-04T07:44:00.000-07:00

"When you write, you lay out a line of words. The line of words is a miner’s pick, a woodcarver’s gouge, a surgeon’s probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year."

(from “The Writing Life” by Annie Dillard, included in Landmark Essays on Writing Process, edited by Sondra Perl, p. 225)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

Why Barbara Kingsolver became a writer

2008-09-01T10:08:00.000-07:00

"... She is asked how she knew, as a young woman growing up in a rural area in Kentucky, that she would always work to support herself.

"Because I am flat-chested," she says flatly. She explains:

"I was 5-9 and weighed 99 pounds. The basis of value for women in my county was very primal. It was strictly in reproductive terms. The most popular girls were the ones who were the most physically mature; they married and had babies very young. I could see that I was not going to be a success in the world of Nicholas County, and that I needed to get out and find some other way to excel.

"And I have."

(from "Novelist In Hog Heaven; `Pigs' Brings Home the Bacon While Its Author Writes Her Heart Out" by Megan Rosenfeld. The Washington Post, Jul 14, 1993. pg. D.01)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

Writing as covert action

2008-08-28T09:21:00.000-07:00

“For most of her life Jane Austen had little opportunity to indulge in solitude. She herself was almost never beyond the reach of family, or out of touch with friends.

“To write is to be self-conscious, as Jane Austen certainly knew. What flows onto paper is more daring or more covert than a writer's own voice.... Composing—and this is the term she generally used—was done in the family sitting room, and it is said, famously, that she quickly covered over the manuscript page when someone else entered unexpectedly, or slipped the pages inside her small mahogany desk.”

(from Jane Austen by Carol Shields, pp. 120-121)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

If Katherine Hepburn had had a child...

2008-08-25T08:33:00.000-07:00

"If I'd had a child," she said, "and the child got sick and was crying just as I had to leave for the theatre, where hundreds of people were waiting for me to perform, and I had to make a choice--the play or the child--well, I'd smother the child to death and go on with the show. You just can't have both," she said with frightening certainty, "a career and children."

(Katherine Hepburn, quoted by Jane Fonda, in My Life So Far, by Jane Fonda, p. 428.)

--Submitted by Chandra Garsson

How much it takes to become a writer...

2008-08-12T10:46:00.000-07:00

"How much it takes to become a writer. Bent (far more common than we assume), circumstances, time, development of craft—but beyond that: how much conviction as to the importance of what one has to say, one's right to say it. And the will, the measureless store of belief in oneself to be able to come to, cleave to, find the form for one's own life comprehensions. Difficult for any male not born into a class that breeds such confidence. Almost impossible for a girl, a woman."

(from Silences by Tillie Olsen, p. 27)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

Another list of childless female writers

2008-08-10T09:29:00.000-07:00

"Think of the literature of writers Dorothy Parker, Ayn Rand, Lillian Hellman, Beatrix Potter, Isak Dinesen, Rachel Carson, Margaret Mitchell, Jane Austen, Helen Keller, Emily Bronte, and Simone de Beauvoir.... These women have enriched our lives immensely in ways other than bringing children into the world."

(from The Childless Revolution: What It Means to Be Childless Today by Madelyn Cain, p. 160)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

The poet as typist

2008-08-04T09:24:00.000-07:00

"I am more happy than if it was my book published! I have worked so closely on these poems of Ted's and typed them so many countless times through revision after revision that I feel ecstatic about it all.

"I am so happy his book is accepted first. . . . I can rejoice, then, much more, knowing Ted is ahead of me."

(from Letters Home by Sylvia Plath, edited by Aurelia Schober Plath, p. 297; letter written on Feb. 24, 1957)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

Virginia Woolf on women

2008-07-21T09:13:00.000-07:00

"And again I am reminded by dipping into newspapers and novels and biographies that when a woman speaks to women she should have something very unpleasant up her sleeve. Women are hard on women. Women dislike women. Women—but are you not sick to death of the word? I can assure you that I am."

(Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own, p. 115).

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

Childless German writers

2008-07-05T08:42:00.000-07:00

..."a considerable portion of women's lives was devoted to life-threatening childbirths and time-consuming child-rearing. It is not surprising, therefore, that a disproportionately large number of women writers were childless (half of the authors in this anthology!), or that women wrote before they were married and after their children had reached adulthood."

(from Bitter Healing: German Women Writers from 1700 to 1830. Jeannine Blackwell, Susanne Zantop. 1990, p. 22.)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins

A mother and daughter disagree

2008-07-01T09:59:00.000-07:00

"Sometimes she [my daughter] tells me of the pain she felt in childhood because I was so often working and not to be distracted, or off on some mysterious pilgrimage, the importance of which, next to herself, she could not understand."

(from Anything We Love Can Be Saved by Alice Walker, p. 45--from a speech given in 1990).

"She was a part of and still is a part of the women's movement,'' Rebecca says, "and there is a sense that young women had been made dependent and kept dependent in many ways. She thought by allowing me this great, independent childhood that I would be more independent and stronger as an adult. I don't think she thought she was being neglectful. I think she thought this was a good, fine thing, to let me experience the world alone.''

(from an interview with Rebecca Walker, daughter of Alice Walker, in the Washington Post, 2001; available on her web site.)

-- Submitted by Beth Blevins