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)

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.

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)