Women Writers Quotes

The dilemma for women who love to write may not have so much to do with finding the elusive literary voice, as with being reluctant to use the one that's already lurking inside, just waiting for the chance to speak up. Many of us, especiall,y those from the generations taught to be good, accommodating girls, are afraid of sounding too strong, too loud, too unconventional, or simply too much like the self we're afraid to reveal to the world. Most of us have at least an inkling of what form our writing voice should take, if only we might find the courage to reveal it. ~ Nava Atlas

As a dedicated, successful writer, Lydia Sigourney violated essential elements of the very gender roles she celebrated. In the process, she offered young, aspiring women writers around the country an example of the possibilities of achieving both fame and economic reward. ~ Lydia Sigourney

As girls gravitate to more contemporary fare and away from Little Women, they are missing a lot. Today's successors to Little Women seem to have overlooked two of the most important themes of Alcott's classic: companionate marriage and sisterhood. And many of them are missing the central premise altogether, namely that growing up means becoming a better person, one who can balance her own needs and desires with those of the people she loves. ~ Anne Boyd Rioux

At such times a young couple found it difficult to believe that in a few hours the whistle would call them, two slaves amongst a multitude of slaves, when they felt that each other was the most important person in the world! They walked on air, and saw the stars shine , and even poverty could not numb their hearts, but let them stray for a short time in that fairy garden whose gate opens but once , and , once closing, nevermore! Miss Nobody- Ethel Carnie ~ Ethel Carnie Holdsworth

Compared to men writers of like distinction and years of life, few women writers have had lives of unbroken productivity, or leave behind a 'body of work.' Early beginnings, then silence; or clogged late ones (foreground silences); long periods between books (hidden silences); characterize most of us. ~ Tillie Olsen

This psychic wound appears to be suffered largely by men. Women writers weren't included in the Romantic roll-call, and never had a lot of Genius medals stuck onto them; in fact, the word 'genius' and the word 'woman' just don't fit together in our language, because the kind of eccentricity expected of male 'geniuses' would simply result in the label 'crazy,' should it be practiced by a woman. ~ Margaret Atwood

Through Miss Behave I am attempting to reclaim my voice one word at a time and live my truth to the best of my ability ~ Malebo Sephodi

Name?" the desk clerk said to me politely, her pencil poised.
"Name," I said vaguely. I remembered, and told her.
"Age?" she asked. "Sex? Occupation?"
"Writer," I said.
"Housewife," she said.
"Writer," I said.
"I'll just put down housewife," she said. ~ Shirley Jackson

A sort of insatiability seems to infect our feelings when we look back on women, particularly on those who are highly interesting and yet whose effort at self-definition through works is fitful, casual, that of an amateur. We are inclined to think they could have done more, that we can make retroactive demands upon them for a greater degree of independence and authenticity. ~ Elizabeth Hardwick

I've noticed over the past years of my writerly life that women writers in particular are discouraged in cleverly disguised forms from including the intellectual in their creative material way more than you would believe. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch

She felt the phrase "demand her rights" had lain inside her forever, waiting. ~ Clarice Lispector

What a revolting contrast exists in England between the slavery of women and the intellectual superiority of women writers. ~ Flora Tristan

Maybe just as many women writers as male writers could be billed as the next great American writer by their publisher. Maybe book criticism sections could review an equal amount of female and male writers. Maybe Oprah could start putting some books by women authors in her book club, since most of her audience is women. ~ Jami Attenberg

I have observed a phenomena about women in this community and is how quick they are able to form opinions and "ideas" about other women without any knowledge of their character and just by virtue of some preconceived notion often fueled by envy, bias and downright bad mind which in many cases have no basis or truth to it.i hate when biotches try to use their lackluster lives as a yardstick for mine ... ~ Crystal Evans

Now, I can tell you about some women writers who truly are fantastic. One is Anna Kavan. She writes stories like I approach "Land of a Thousand Dances": she's caught in a haze and then a light, a little teeny light, come through. It could be a leopard, that light, or it could be a spot of blood. It could be anything. But she hooks onto that and spirals out. And she does it within the accessible rhythms of plot, and that's really exciting. She's not hung up with being a woman, she just keeps extending herself, keeps telescoping language and plot.

Another great woman writer is Iris Sarazan, who wrote The Runaway. She considered herself a mare, a wild runaway. She was a really intelligent girl stuck in all these convents with a hungry mind. I identify with her 'cause of her hunger to go beyond herself. She wound up in prison, but she escaped and wrote some great books before kicking off. Her books aren't page after page of her beating her breast about how shitty she's been treated, they're books about her exciting telescoping plans of escape. Rhythm, great wild rhythm....

The French poet, Rimbaud, predicted that the next great crop of writers would be women. He was the first guy who ever made a big women's liberation statement, saying that when women release themselves from the long servitude of men they're really gonna gush. New rhythms, new poetries, new horrors, new beauties. And I believe in that completely. (1976 Penthouse interview) ~ Patti Smith

Reinvent yourself over and over and over and over and over until you find home. There is no timeline for the soul. ~ Malebo Sephodi

The French fairy tale writers were so popular and prolific that when their stories were eventually collected in the 18th century, they filled forty–one volumes of a massive publication called the Cabinet des Fées. Charles Perrault is the French fairy tale writer whom history has singled out for attention, but the majority of tales in the Cabinet des Fées were penned by women writers who ran and attended the leading salons: Marie–Catherine d'Aulnoy, Henriette Julie de Murat, Marie–Jeanne L'Héritier, and numerous others. These were educated women with an unusual degree of social and artistic independence, and within their use of the fairy tale form one can find distinctly subversive, even feminist subtext. ~ Terri Windling

A woman writer, except in rare instances, has no protection such as enjoyed by men who use their wives and mistresses as a marline to save themselves from the wear and tear of interruption. ~ Miles Franklin

We don't want to create a literary ghetto in which black writers are only allowed to write black characters and women writers are put on 'girl books.' ~ G. Willow Wilson

What we need is more women writers, writing for older women. There are some actresses who have production companies and create their own material, and I truly admire that. ~ Kathleen Turner

Favoring 'resolution' the way we do, it is hard for us men to write great love stories. Why?, because we want to tell too much. We aren't satisfied unless at the end of the story the characters are lying there, panting. ~ Roman Payne

It had been communicated to me through the odd, secret whispers of women that a female's nose must never shine. In war, in famine, in fire, it had to be matte, and no one got a lipstick without the requisite face powder. … I was taunted by the problem: how could someone write something like the 'Symposium' and make sure her nose did not shine at the same time? It didn't matter to me that I was reading a translation. I'd read Plato's brilliant, dense prose and not be able to tear myself away. Even as a reader my nose shined. It was clearly either/or. You had to concentrate on either one or the other. In a New York minute, the oil from Saudi Arabia could infiltrate your house and end up on your nose. It didn't hurt, it didn't make noise, it didn't incapacitate in any way except for the fact that no girl worth her salt took enough time away from vigilance to read a book let alone write one. ~ Andrea Dworkin

Some people desire to be famous. I probably wouldn't be very good at it. ~ Sarah Warman

In my experience, and that of a lot of other women writers, all of the questions coming at them from interviewers tend to be about how lucky they are to be where they are - about luck and identity and how the idea struck them. ~ Eleanor Catton

Misbehaviour does not require a cape, shades or a bazooka. It is in decisions we make that challenge the notions adopted to keep us well behaved ~ Malebo Sephodi

Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics. ~ Virginia Woolf

There are a lot of women writers who never get married and don't have kids. I am married, but I didn't marry until I was 43. I knew when I was young that if I had to make a choice between being married and being a writer, I would have chosen to be a writer. I think it's a career where you have to put the career first. I don't have kids but - and luckily everyone isn't like this - I think if you have that passion, in a way, your career is your child. ~ Candace Bushnell

Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you've no longer been bested by these events. ~ Louise Gluck

I've been trying to find women writers for my staff for a while now and I have three women on my staff and three guys so it's pretty equal. I don't know why that is. It's been the same thing for a while. It's hard for female comedians to stand out. That's weird. That's a shame. ~ Ellen DeGeneres

There were all us baby boomers who had a grammar school education, started to learn, then went on the pill, the whole thing, and so there are today a lot more women writers, editors, producers, and so a lot more women's stories. God, the BBC's practically run by women. ~ Julie Walters

I want to live in a society where we are all liberated. This is what my feminism looks like ~ Malebo Sephodi

I find myself coming out of the library with all women writers. I keep hoping the library attendant won't notice, but when 8 out of 8 of the books you take out are by women, you try not to look too dykey. ~ Eve Babitz

When the truth emerges, it can't be ignored. Nor will it wait. ~ Barbara Delinsky

The women of the South have brought into American literature a unique mixture of domesticity and grotesquerie. ~ James Dickey

The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one's individuality, that unique which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other. ~ Azar Nafisi

It's amazing how much easier it is to bake a cake when you've got an eternity to get it right. ~ Holly Walrath

THE HONEYEATER story was mesmerizing: the story took hold of me and I felt compelled to write it. I was also inspired by a few female authors (among them, Doris Lessing and Isabel Allende) I've admired over the years
women who preceded me and who gave me the courage to even begin. ~ Yolanda A. Reid

Fairy tales for adult readers remained popular throughout Europe well into the 19th century - particularly in Germany, where the Brothers Grimm published their massive collection of German fairy tales (revised and edited to reflect the Brothers' patriotic and patriarchal ideals), providing inpiration for novelists, poets, and playrights among the German Romantics. Recently, fairy tale scholars have re–discovered the enormous body of work produced by women writers associated with the German Romantics: Grisela von Arnim, Sophie Tieck Bernhardi, Karoline von Günderrode, Julie Berger, and Sophie Albrecht, to name just a few. ~ Terri Windling

What wouldn't my people give for a few bites of the biryani she ordered me to throw away yesterday because she said it smelt? ~ Renita D'Silva

And now we who are writing women and strange monsters
Still search our hearts to find the difficult answers,
Still hope that we may learn to lay our hands
More gently and more subtly on the burning sands. ~ May Sarton

Sitting down with younger women writers and saying, "This is what I do and you can do this" is hugely important. ~ Sarah Ruhl

If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine
why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as 'irrelevant'? ~ May Sarton

We live in a time when the values of courage and honesty, particularly for women writers, equate to confessing only the darkest, most painful parts of our lives. "How brave you are," my students say to each other over workshop tables, "to expose that." Meaning, to uncover this family secret or that heinous act or to openly confront the demons of alcoholism, promiscuity, substance abuse, incest, infidelity, illness, betrayal ... I have also wrestled many dark angels, and continue to do so, so I acknowledge the price such writing exacts. But more and more I have come to respect the honesty and courage required to recognize the bright angels when they appear in our memory, and to allow them equal space in our narratives. ~ Rebecca McClanahan

I Became a free woman when I decided to stop dreaming, freedom that is waiting for nothing .. and anticipation is a state of slavery - Ahlam (Chaos of the Senses) ~ Ahlam Mosteghanemi

according to a brief perusal of women writer's comments online over the past few days, men are: overly confident, predatory, helpless, psychopaths, terrified of women, fascists, the reason why the world is in this mess, literally so stupid, and the problem here. Of course what these women really mean is that they themselves are not overly confident, not predatory, not helpless, and on down the line. It's just easier to say that men are these things, than that you are not these things. People would rightly become suspicious if you suddenly started going on about how amazing you were. They'd start looking for proof you weren't. But by attributing these negative behaviors and traits to your "opposite" group, it's an easy, criticism-proof way of saying, "I would never behave like this, I would never be like this." And ~ Jessa Crispin

If you are a woman and wish to become pre-eminent in a field, it's a good idea to (a) invent it and (b) locate it in an area either so badly paid or of such low status that men don't want it ~ Joanna Russ

Male critics and men in the publishing industry want from their women writers what they want from their wives. I'm interested in presenting characters that are more challenging, threatening, complicated and unpredictable. ~ Kate Braverman

Women writers should write a lot if they want to write. Take the English women, for example. What amazing workers. ~ Anton Chekhov

If a writer starts worring about what he or she has left out or forgotten, they might not be able to write even a single line. ~ Baby Halder

The truth is that I need the stimulus of other people. Alone, over my dead fire, I tend to see the thin places in my own stories. The real novelist, the perfectly simple human being, could go on, indefinitely, imagining. He would not integrate, as I do. He would not have this devastating sense of grey ashes in a burnt-out grate. ~ Virginia Woolf

I believe a writer is...the scribe-griot of his/her nation. S/he has the power to incite, ignite, excite, pacify, edify, motivate and eliminate others with the slash of a pen, click of a mouse or swipe of a finger. Though coloured by time, class, age, geography, childhood and other factors, a writer crystallises a slice of his/her society's culture, mores and its dark and light truths. A writer makes everything real. ~ Sandra Sealy

That's what a poem is. Words which have a hidden meaning. A poem is like a secret. ~ Monique Roffey

Women writers make for rewarding (and efficient) lovers. They are clever liars to fathers and husbands; yet they never hold their tongues too long, nor keep ardent typing fingers still. ~ Roman Payne

They were from different generations, culture, nations. But even these things did not divide them so much as their separate conceptions of what it meant to be a woman. ~ Patricia Duncker

Neither black/red/yellow nor woman but poet or writer. For many of us, the question of priorities remains a crucial issue. Being merely "a writer" without a doubt ensures one a status of far greater weight than being "a woman of color who writes" ever does. Imputing race or sex to the creative act has long been a means by which the literary establishment cheapens and discredits the achievements of non-mainstream women writers. She who "happens to be" a (non-white) Third World member, a woman, and a writer is bound to go through the ordeal of exposing her work to the abuse and praises and criticisms that either ignore, dispense with, or overemphasize her racial and sexual attributes. Yet the time has passed when she can confidently identify herself with a profession or artistic vocation without questioning and relating it to her color-woman condition. ~ Trinh T. Minh-ha

Men like women who write, even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country. ~ Marguerite Duras

... it had become agreed that Jane would be excused household duties. It sounds like a tiny thing – and indeed it was – but a tiny trickle of water gradually hollows out a stone. Jane's ducking out of the housework in order to write would lead inexorably onwards, upwards, towards women working, to women winning power in a world of men. This is the significance of trying to reconstruct the detail of Jane Austen's daily life. ~ Lucy Worsley

What else do we have to expose and investigate corruption and maintain informed citizenry? When all levels of government and justice system are abusing power, where can people go with claims of that abuse? Only the press. ~ JoeAnn Hart

She felt she had been created by the demands of others, by their insatiable appetite for something beyond ordinary life. They craved a world without death and they had spotted her, in their hunger, like wolves alert to any poor sheep that might stray from the fold and stand gazing ignorantly up at the stars. ~ Valerie Martin

I think it's so fun when I get to work with women writers in particular because we really understand the core story or foundation as women. That's so important to me that the authenticity is there, you know, from the place that I speak from for my women. Having other females with me helps me dig deeper. ~ Ciara

Life is beauty simply breathing. ~ A.D. Posey

I am protective of the gentle slope of stomach bulging like an early pregnancy, at my waist. I've earned its existence with everything I've been forced to swallow. ~ Stephanie Roberts

The tragedy in the lives of the people is in what does not happen, rather than in what does happen -in all they do not realise.

Ethel Carnie -Miss Nobody ~ Ethel Carnie Holdsworth

Why would we dare call someone a Literary Witch? Because all artists are magicians, and Witches wield a special magic. Witches and women writers alike dwell in creativity, mystery and other worlds. They aren't afraid to be alone in the woods of their imaginations or to live in huts of their own making. They're not afraid of the dark.' * ~ Taisia Kitaiskaia

She wants me to ruin her
And my pen makes her into poetry! ~ Avijeet Das

Women writers specifically ... are the ultimate outsiders. ~ Janet Fitch

The solutions are obvious. Stop making excuses. Stop saying women run publishing. Stop justifying the lack of parity in prominent publications that have the resources to address gender inequity. Stop parroting the weak notiong that you're simply publishing the best writing, regardless. There is ample evidence of the excellence of women writers. Publish more women writers. If women aren't submitting to your publication or press, ask yourself why, deal with the answers even if those answers make you uncomfortable, and then reach out to women writers. If women don't respond to your solicitations, go find other women. Keep doing that, issue after issue after issue. Read more widely. Create more inclusive measures of excellence. Ensure that books by mean and women are being reviewed in equal numbers. Nominate more deserving women for the important awards. Deal with your resentment. Deal with your biases. Vigorously resist the urge to dismiss the gender problem. Make the effort and make the effort and make the effort until you no longer need to, until we don't need to keep having this conversation.

Change requires intent and effort. It really is that simple. ~ Roxane Gay

When the owner fired me, he said he was sorry, since he admired what I was trying to do. Really? What was it, exactly, that I was trying to do? Oh right. Something about equality. ~ JoeAnn Hart

A man once asked me ... how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed family with a lot of male friends? I replied that, on the contrary, I was an only child and had practically never seen or spoken to any men of my own age till I was about twenty-five. "Well," said the man, "I shouldn't have expected a woman (meaning me) to have been able to make it so convincing." I replied that I had coped with this difficult problem by making my men talk, as far as possible, like ordinary human beings. This aspect of the matter seemed to surprise the other speaker; he said no more, but took it away to chew it over. One of these days it may quite likely occur to him that women, as well as men, when left to themselves, talk very much like human beings also. ~ Dorothy L. Sayers

Stories not only give us a much needed practice on figuring out what makes people tick, they give us insight into how we tick. ~ Lisa Cron

When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, 'Women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute. Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile.' ~ Lorrie Moore

But sometimes the women writers will pitch something and I'll hear it, but the men will keep talking. ~ Wanda Sykes

The more women writers I read, from Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler to Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Toni Morrison, the less alone I felt, and the more I began to see myself as part of something more. It wasn't about one woman toiling against the universe. It was about all of us moving together, crying out into some black, inhospitable place that we would not be quiet, we would not go silently, we would not stop speaking, we would not give in. * ~ Kameron Hurley

Being friends is different from being lovers. It's a sea change. ~ Barbara Delinsky

Find her with the flowers.
The roses,
The marigolds.
Find her telling stories that
She's never before told.
Find her when she is vulnerable
And honest
And true.

When you find this girl,
Just know
I'd keep her close
If I were you.

She'll write a tale in growing time that
Almost seems to last forever.
Don't ask her when she will stop daydreaming.
She will simply look at you
And say,
"never"
Because forever in her fairy tales
the girl with the flowers will be.
Finding things of inspiration
To keep her heart beating
And her spirits light
Humming a simple harmony. ~ Alice Tyszka

And thank goodness Jane did not meet in real life an Edmund Bertram, or a Mr Knightley, because if she had married she would doubtless, like her niece Anna, have produced human rather then paper progeny. So – for their failures of courage or determination – we can, must, give thanks to Charles Powlett, who wanted to kiss Jane when she was twenty; to Tom Lefroy, seen off by Madam Lefroy; to the talkative Reverend Samuel Blackall; to the silent Harris Bigg-Wither; to the Reverend Edward Bridges; to Robert Holt-Leigh, the dodgy MP who flirted with Jane in 1806; and to William Seymour, her brother Henry's lawyer, who failed to ask Jane to marry him as they travelled in that carriage. ~ Lucy Worsley

There is a monstrous garden in the sky
Nightly they sow it fresh. Nightly it springs,
Luridly splendid, towards the moon on high.
Red-poppy flares, and fire-bombs rosy-bright
Shell-bursts like hellborn sunflowers, gold and white
Lilies, long-stemmed, that search the heavens' height...
They tend it well, these gardeners on wings!

How rich these blossoms, hideously fair
Sprawling above the shuddering citadel
As though ablaze with laughter! Lord, how long
Must we behold them flower, ruthless, strong
Soaring like weeds the stricken worlds among
Triumphant, gay, these dreadful blooms of hell?

O give us back the garden that we knew
Silent and cool, where silver daisies lie,
The lovely stars! O garden purple-blue
Where Mary trailed her skirts amidst the dew
Of ageless planets, hand-in-hand with You
And Sleep and Peace walked with Eternity.....

But here I sit, and watch the night roll by.
There is a monstrous garden in the sky!

(written during an air raid, London, midnight, October 1941) ~ Margery Lawrence

Love is alive when there's music in your heart. ~ A.D. Posey

Everywhere the poems open. ~ Mary Kinzie

It does seem, in other words, not only more difficult for a woman experimental writer to be accepted than for a woman writer (which corresponds to the male situation of experimental writer vs. writer), but also peculiarly more difficult for a woman experimental writer to be accepted than for a male experimental writer. She may, if young, get caught up in a "movement," like Djuna Barnes, like H.D., like Laura Riding, as someone's mistress, and then be forgotten, or if old, she maybe "admitted" into a group, under a label, but never quite as seriously considered as the men in that group. ~ Christine Brooke-Rose

The biographies of the great men see their excesses as signs of their greatness. But Jean Rhys, in her biography, is read as borderline; Anaïs Nin is borderline; Djuna is borderline; etc. etc. Borderline personality disorder being an overwhelmingly gendered diagnosis. I write in Heroines: "The charges of borderline personality disorder are the same charges against girls writing literature, I realize - too emotional, too impulsive, no boundaries. ~ Kate Zambreno

It was the kind of story everybody likes, about a tough girl who becomes a truer version of herself by uncovering her vulnerability. It was the kind of story people like because its universe is played out in the story of one person. It was the kind of story (dare I say it?) that women are supposed to write because all its truths are grounded in a single lie: denying chaos. ~ Chris Kraus

You can be killed for just being female ~ JoeAnn Hart

Over a quarter of the scenario writers were women and many of them were already friends, including June Mathis, Agnes Christine Johnston, Dorothy Farnum, Gladys Unger, and Winifred Eaton Reeve. Most had entered the business at a time when a one-page synopsis of action could be turned into a two-reeler, but they had grown with the industry and were now well paid and highly valued for their abilities. The women were as likely to write jungle films or swashbucklers as tales of female angst and Thalberg maintained that his preference for women writers was a commercial one. ~ Cari Beauchamp

Before there were books, we read each other. ~ Lisa Cron

What did we talk about?

I don't remember. We talked so hard and sat so still that I got cramps in my knee. We had too many cups of tea and then didn't want to leave the table to go to the bathroom because we didn't want to stop talking. You will think we talked of revolution but we didn't. Nor did we talk of our own souls. Nor of sewing. Nor of babies. Nor of departmental intrigue. It was political if by politics you mean the laboratory talk that characters in bad movies are perpetually trying to convey (unsuccessfully) when they Wrinkle Their Wee Brows and say (valiantly--dutifully--after all, they didn't write it) "But, Doctor, doesn't that violate Finagle's Constant?" I staggered to the bathroom, released floods of tea, and returned to the kitchen to talk. It was professional talk. It left my grey-faced and with such concentration that I began to develop a headache. We talked about Mary Ann Evans' loss of faith, about Emily Brontë's isolation, about Charlotte Brontë's blinding cloud, about the split in Virginia Woolf's head and the split in her economic condition. We talked about Lady Murasaki, who wrote in a form that no respectable man would touch, Hroswit, a little name whose plays "may perhaps amuse myself," Miss Austen, who had no more expression in society than a firescreen or a poker. They did not all write letters, write memoirs, or go on the stage. Sappho--only an ambiguous, somewhat disagreeable name. Corinna? The teacher of Pindar. Olive Schriener, gr ~ Joanna Russ

And I *know* I wrote in the above that I hate biographies and reviews that focus on the psychological, surface detail, especially when they pertain to women writers, because I think it's really about the cult of the personality, which is essentially problematic, and I think simplistically psychologizing which biographies are so wont to do is really problematic, and dangerous, especially when dealing with complicated women who just by being writers at a certain time and age were labelled as nonconformist, or worse, hysterical or ill or crazy, and I think branding these women as femme fatales is all so often done. And I know in a way I'm contributing to this by posting their bad-ass photos, except hopefully I am humanizing them and thinking of them as complicated selves and intellects AND CELEBRATING THEM AS WRITERS as opposed to straight-up objectifying. One particular review long ago in Poetry that really got my goat was when Brian Phillips used Gertrude Stein's line about Djuna Barnes having nice ankles as an opener in a review of her poetry, and to my mind it was meant to be entirely dismissive, as of course, Stein was being as well. Stein was many important revolutionary things to literature, but a champion of her fellow women writers she was not. They published my letter, but then let the guy write a reply and scurry to the library and actually read Nightwood, one of my all-time, all-times, and Francis Bacon's too, there's another anecdote. And it's burned in my brain his ~ Kate Zambreno

Throughout much of history, women writers have capitulated to male standards, and have paid too much heed to what Virginia Woolf calls "the angel in the house." She is that little ghost who sits on one's shoulder while one writes and whispers, "Be nice, don't say anything that will embarrass the family, don't say anything your man will disapprove of ... " [ellipsis in original] The "angel in the house" castrates one's creativity because it deprives one of essential honesty, and many women writers have yet to win the freedom to be honest with themselves. ~ Erica Jong

Women writers of all people should know better than to pigeonhole women, put them in little groups, the smart one, the sweet one. ~ Anna Quindlen

I'm really aware that in fiction, women are pretty much equal. There's a lot of very successful women novelists. Not so much [for women writers working] in film. ~ Emma Donoghue

Someday hopefully it won't be necessary to allocate a special evening to celebrate where we are and how far we've come ... someday women writers, producers and crew members will be so commonplace, and roles and salaries for actresses will outstrip those for men, and pigs will fly. ~ Sigourney Weaver

I dealt with it the same way I deal with everything. I just tended my own garden, didn't pay much attention, behaved - I suppose - deviously. I mean I didn't actually let too many people know what I was doing. ~ Joan Didion

You'll be amazed how much you have in common with Edith Wharton (who struggled to feel worthy of success), Louisa May Alcott (who badly needed money), Madaleine L'Engle (who could have papered an entire house with her rejection letters) and other writers... ~ Nava Atlas

Male writers are thought of as "writers" first and then "men". As for female writers, they are first "feamle" and only then "writers". ~ Elif Shafak

It galls me that seeking out the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant is the expected (if not altogether acceptable) behavior of male writers; it would surely benefit me, as a writer, if I had the courage to seek out more of the seedy, the sordid, the sexual, and the deviant myself. But women who seek out such things are made to feel ashamed, or else they sound stridently ridiculous in defending themselves
as if they're bragging ... Yet there are subjects that remain off-limits for women writers. It's not unlike that dichotomy which exists regarding one's sexual past: it is permissible, even attractive, for a man to have had one, but if a woman has had a sexual past, she'd better keep quiet about it. ~ John Irving

Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa. ~ Peter Straub

Being a woman is inherently uncanny. Your humanity is liminal; your body is forfeit; your mind is doubted as a matter of course. You exist in the periphery, and I think many women writers can't help but respond to that state. ~ Carmen Maria Machado

Stop mansplaining menstrution, we've got this. ~ Silvia Young

When my brother, ... , was a young boy learning the Chinese classics, I was in the habit of listening with him and I became unusually proficient at understanding those passages that he found too difficult to grasp and memorize. Father a most learned man, was always regretting the fact: 'Just my luck!' he would say. 'What a pity she was not born a man!' But then I gradually realized that people were saying 'It's bad enough when a man flaunts his Chinese learning; she will come to no good,' and since I have avoided writing the simplest character. ~ Murasaki Shikibu

Don't compare her to sunshine and roses when she's clearly orchids and moonlight. ~ Melody Lee