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.)

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.

Making time to write--by losing sleep

"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)

If Katherine Hepburn had had a child...

"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