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.)

Writing in a magic house

"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)