She Writes Quotes & Sayings

Lily Brown writes with and against things in poems that are coiled up tight as springs (or snakes). A believer in the power of the line, she writes, 'I think the plastics/and sink them' then 'Where is the sand/man hiding the dirt.' These terse, biting poems will make you look around and wonder. — Rae Armantrout

Described by Harold Bloom as "the beginning of the end of the traditional novel of social morality" (xii), George Eliot's Middlemarch is nonetheless replete with a kind of authorial intervention that modern readers might find tiresome. Readers today are accustomed to the contemporary fictional maxim of "show, don't tell" but Eliot had different aesthetic ideas, for she always tells us right away who we are dealing with. At the beginning of Middlemarch, the character of one of its protagonists, Dorothea Brooke, is laid out. Eliot writes, — George Eliot

Deliberately or not, every author is of course present in every book he or she writes - even in a scientific text. — Abraham Pais

I'm looking for a writer who doesn't know where the sentence is leading her; a writer who starts with her obsessions and whose heart is bursting with love, a writer sly enough to give the slip to her secret police, the ones who know her so well, the ones with the power to accuse and condemn in the blink of an eye. It's all right that she doesn't know what she's thinking until she writes it, as if the words already exist somewhere and draw her to them. She may not know how she got there, but she knows when she's arrived. — Sy Safransky

A man looks down at the red paint on his hands and wonders for a moment if he's killed his wife and this is her blood or maybe he's just painted the garden bench red, that's all. He thinks it is a strange thought and carries on digging the hole he's digging in the back garden. He whistles. He writes this all down in his moleskin diary, later that evening. His wife should be back from work by now but she isn't. — Pleasefindthis

At length the Turk turned to Larry:
'You write, I believe?' he said with complete lack of interest.
Larry's eyes glittered. Mother, seeing the danger signs, rushed in quickly before he could reply.
'Yes, yes' she smiled, 'he writes away, day after day. Always tapping at the typewriter'
'I always feel that I could write superbly if I tried' remarked the Turk.
'Really?' said Mother. 'Yes, well, it's a gift I suppose, like so many things.'
'He swims well' remarked Margo, 'and he goes out terribly far'
'I have no fear' said the Turk modestly. 'I am a superb swimmer, so I have no fear. When I ride the horse, I have no fear, for I ride superbly. I can sail the boat magnificently in the typhoon without fear'
He sipped his tea delicately, regarding our awestruck faces with approval.
'You see' he went on, in case we had missed the point, 'you see, I am not a fearful man. — Gerald Durrell

Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'."
(on Lillian Hellman) — Mary McCarthy

Helen Lowe writes wonderful stories, yes, but her work also speaks with lyricism to deeper questions of how we treat each other. With lovely prose that brings vivid life to her characters, she creates a universe with people we care about. This is an author with a gift for fantasy. — Catherine Asaro

She decides to make a list of the things that make her happy. She writes 'plum-blossom' at the top of a piece of paper. Then she stares at the paper, unable to think of anything else. Eventually it begins to get dark. — Neil Gaiman

So in 1924, Eleanor Roosevelt really gets a sense of what the limits of the battle and the contours of the battle are going to be. The men are contemptuous of the women, and the women really need to organize. She writes an article which becomes an article she writes in different ways over and over and over again: Women need to organize. They need to create their own bosses. They need to have support networks and gangs so that they are a force. — Blanche Wiesen Cook

She feels so contented in giving birth to a child, in helping the child to grow; and that's why she does not need any other kind of creativity. Her creative urge is fulfilled. But man is in trouble: he cannot give birth to a child, he cannot have the child in his womb. He has to find a substitute, otherwise he will always feel inferior to the woman. And deep down he does feel that he is inferior. Because of that feeling of inferiority man tries to create paintings, statues, dramas, he writes poetry, novels, explores the whole scientific world of creativity. — Rajneesh

In her memoirs she writes that she left the hospital job because it eventually made her numb to suffering, and it left her no time to write. She neglected — David Brooks

But my mother was aglow. She had a continuing fascination with celebrities, and now she had one of her own. She was never moved by what I was doing (in an interview she said, "He writes his own material, I'm always telling him he needs a new writer") ... — Steve Martin

In You Are Not Dead Wendy Xu breaks all the old rules that have never done us any favors anyway. She writes beautifully, noticing who we are, and letting us see ourselves with a little more humanity, a little more humor, a little more humility. I'm happy to have read this book. — James Tate

One can learn a lot about a person by the things she writes. — Becky Watson

Obviously, a writer can't know everything about what she writes. It's impossible. — Anne Rice

Still now I send letters into space
Hoping that some mailman somewhere will track you down
And recognise you from the descriptions in my poems
That he will place the stack of them in your hands and tell you,
There is a girl who still writes you, she doesn't know how not to — Sarah Kay

Infrastructure has no ideology," she writes. "Bridges either stay up or fall down. — Anonymous

Suppose that a person writes what she must. That is only the first step of becoming a writer. The work must survive the moment of creation. It must get out to an audience. She or he must dare to show the work. She must risk ridicule, misunderstanding, scandal, condemnation, & what's often worse, none of the above: silence. No attention at all. — Marge Piercy

People were always saying to Margaret, 'Well, Julia sings and Betsy writes. Now what is little Margaret going to do?' Margaret would smile politely, for she was very polite, but privately she stormed to Betsy with flashing eyes, 'I'm not going to do anything. I want to just live. Can't people just live? — Maud Hart Lovelace

It isn't porn. It's erotic romance. There is a huge difference. Amber Rose writes hot love stories. And if you can't handle it, then I don't care. I love her books, and I wish I had known who she was when I met her. Erotic romance helped me figure out what I wanted." Jake — Lexi Blake

I try to keep my gaze from drifting to her, but I find myself watching her as she taps away at the keyboard, completely oblivious. I twist my pen between my finger and thumb, staring at her. She tilts her head and looks down at her notebook, adjusting her glasses as her pen scribbles over the page. Her light blue eyes flick along as she writes. She bites the edge of her lip and suddenly looks up at me. — Dannielle Wicks

Agatha Chubb, expert in ancient wizarding artefacts, has identified no fewer than twelve lead Bludgers dating from this period, discovered both in Irish peat bogs and English marshes. "They are undoubtedly Bludgers rather than cannonballs," she writes. The faint indentations of magically reinforced Beaters' bats are visible and one can see the distinctive hallmarks of manufacture by a wizard (as opposed to a Muggle) - the smoothness of line, the perfect symmetry. A final clue was the fact that each and every one of them whizzed around my study and attempted to knock me to the floor when released from its case, — J.K. Rowling

With the money from the legal settlement, he hires a beautiful young woman from the local university to type for him as he orally composes the sentences. But soon he realizes she is editing and rewriting what he tells her before she even types it in. And what dawns on him is that she is the better writer. Soon he sits mute in the room while she writes. He only watches. He wants to kill her, strangle her with his hands. But he can't move his hands to do it. He is in hell. — Michael Connelly

She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon]. — Kurt Vonnegut

Not all of us receive the ends that we deserve. Many moments that change a life's course - a conversation with a stranger on a ship, for example - are pure luck. And yet no one writes you a letter, or chooses you as their confessor, without good reason. This is what she taught me: you have to be ready in order to be lucky. You have to put your pieces into play. — Jessie Burton

My first novel was turned down by about twenty publishers over a period of two and a half years. Because my name is Irish and would not be familiar to English editors, one of them said: 'If she writes anything else, do let us know.' Slowly, very slowly, the books began to sell and be noticed. — Colm Toibin

The writer trusts nothing she writes-it should be too reckless and alive for that, it should be beautiful and menacing and slightly out of control ... Good writing ... explodes in the reader's face. Whenever the writer writes, it's always three or four or five o'clock in the morning in her head. — Joy Williams

When I was writing Green Girl,I was reading Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, and she's very dismissive of the young girl. She writes about the girl as being from this space of bad faith and blankness. I'm more interested in a messy space. — Kate Zambreno

My favourite author as a child and teenager, and who I still re-read now, is K. M. Peyton. She writes very truthfully; sometimes I'm not sure if I've actually done things or just experienced them in her books. — Sadie Jones

That was what true love was supposed to be about. Couples slobbering all over each other, only just able to let each other out of sight long enough to go to the loo. True love was not furtively checking your email, while your other half is in the bathroom to see if you have a message from someone you met out once. True love shouldn't be disappointed when your ex writes with the news that another old girlfriend is back on the scene.
'Fuck' she couldn't do this. She couldn't keep pretending. Not a single day longer. — Chris Manby

I have long observed that the act of writing is viewed, by some, as an elite and otherworldly act, all the more so if a person isn't paid for what she writes. — Joyce Maynard

It was when she started dealing coke so she could lose weight. It had worked, sort of. I think she still has a fat ass, and can look dumpy, and has dried-out black hair and writes awful poetry and I'm pissed off that I let her get into that position of denying me. — Bret Easton Ellis

Figaro is a bad play. It stirs up hatred between the classes. In France, it has caused nothing but bitterness. My own dear sister,Antoinette, writes me that she is beginning to be frightened of her own people. — Peter Shaffer

Every reader writes the book he or she reads, supplying what isn't there, and that creative invention becomes the book. — Siri Hustvedt

She drinks pints of coffee and writes little observations and ideas for stories with her best fountain pen on the linen-white pages of expensive notebooks. Sometimes, when it's going badly, she wonders if what she believes to be a love of the written word is really just a fetish for stationery. — David Nicholls

Toni Morrison is challenged regularly because she is a black author who writes about the real world. She speaks with so much knowledge about black issues she can't be accused of creating these (issues). People find these issues threatening. — Judith Krug

Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art. — Erica Jong

The "truth" is the poem itself. Just because someone writes a poem about a feeling she has does not mean that the feeling will stay forever. The truth of the emotion of the poem remains, even if the particular truth of the poet changes. — Denise Duhamel

Suppose she denied him then but favored him some other time? Women are weak and easily conquered by flattery. Especially when men write verses to them, and there are some who sat that Wyatt writes better verses than me, though I am the King. — Hilary Mantel

She dreamed that night of chickweed, which was a strange thing to dream about. Chickweed is a low, weedy little plant, not very distinguished. No one writes poetry comparing their lovers to chickweed (or if they do, the poems are rarely well received). — T. Kingfisher

different genres. To go with her fiction, she also writes nonfiction in many different fields with books available on resume writing, companion gardening — Dale Mayer

Quiet, moving, masterfully crafted. Such are the nine stories in Venus in the Afternoon. Tehila Lieberman writes with precision, restraint, with a compassionate heart. She inhabits her characters, young or old, men or women, honestly, but without judgment, until they rise off the page and stand before us breathing and alive. New York, the Atacama desert, Amsterdam or Cuzco in Peru, the settings in Venus in the Afternoon are just as varied as the lives which they contain. A wonderful collection, one that will stay in your mind long after you have bid it goodbye. — Miroslav Penkov

unopened. When her son stands in the night outside her house, she goes to bed early. In the morning, she looks at his photograph, writes adoring letters to a long-defunct address. A spinster sees the face of the young man who loved her in the mirror of her bedroom, on the ceiling of the bakery, on the surface of the lake, in the sky. The — Alan Lightman

By 1938, Eleanor Roosevelt was so angry at FDR's policies, she writes a book called This Troubled World. And it is actually a point-by-point rebuttal of her husband's foreign policy. We need collective security. We need a World Court. We need something like the League of Nations. We need to work together to fight fascism. We need embargoes against aggressor nations, and we need to name aggressor nations. All of which is a direct contradiction of FDR's policies. — Blanche Wiesen Cook

When a woman writes you a poem, she spends time with the gods on your behalf. — Aja Monet

Gail Anderson-Dargatz has a noticing eye, a voice as unique as the countryside she writes about, and a heart large enough to love her entire cast of distinct and memorable characters. In The Cure for Death by Lightning she fashions an irresistible song out of the joys and dangers of growing up, the mysteries and wonders of life on a farm, the thrilling terror of trying to outrun the awful unseen force that pursues a growing girl. This novel opens a door to a shining, surprising world. — Jack Hodgins

Sometimes he feels a pull towards Francesca. She was the reason he came into the group. It was her misery that united them and somehow her personality that kept them together when everyone split. She's the one that writes the letter to kept the world informed. She listens to the news every hour to make sure everyone's safe. So tonight he walks away even though she's moved forward to give him a hug. Because he wants to kiss her, and knows she'll hate him for it and that he'll hate himself. He knows it's for all the wrong reasons and that he'll end up thinking of Tara Finke and her Brazilian peacekeeper and will Trombal and how he doesn't do romance, but it eats the space between him and Francesca every time he's in the room with her. — Melina Marchetta

Lizzy Weiss is such a great writer, and she really writes for the performances. — Vanessa Marano

1978 when she decided to contact Clinton. That's when events took a turn for the worse. As Christopher Andersen writes in American Evita: Juanita checked into Little Rock's Camelot — Victor Thorn

Love a girl who writes, and live her many lives;
You have yet to find her, beneath her words of guise.
Kiss her blue inked fingers, forgive the pens they marked.
The stain of your lips upon her, the one she can't discard.
Forget her tattered memories, or the pages others took;
You are her ever-after, the hero of her book. — Lang Leav

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

Eleanor Roosevelt fights for an anti-lynch law with the NAACP, with Walter White and Mary McLeod Bethune. And she begs FDR to say one word, say one word to prevent a filibuster or to end a filibuster. From '34 to '35 to '36 to '37 to '38, it comes up again and again, and FDR doesn't say one word. And the correspondence between them that we have, I mean, she says, "I cannot believe you're not going to say one word." And she writes to Walter White, "I've asked FDR to say one word. Perhaps he will." But he doesn't. And these become very bitter disagreements. — Blanche Wiesen Cook

A confession: I am not a good friend. Lyndsey writes letters, Lyndsey makes calls. Lyndsey makes plans. Everything I do is in reaction to everything she does, and I'm terrified of the day she decides not to pick up the phone, not to take the first step. I'm terrified of the day Lyndsey outgrows my secrets, my ways. Outgrows me. — Victoria Schwab

And in her [Eleanor Roosevelt] letters, she writes the most, you know, fanciful letters: when we are together, and when we are reunited, and you know, I will be your surrogate wife. Of course she doesn't use that word, but I will be the mother to my brothers, and I will be your primary love. — Blanche Wiesen Cook

When she writes, which isn't often, I get insanely jealous of the way her mind works, the fact that she seems to create for her own pleasure and not to make herself known. — Lena Dunham

At the time I wasn't even sure what she meant - what does anyone do? We mark time until we die. She was still waiting for an answer. My roommate filled the silence. "He's a writer," he said. "Oh," she said. "What does he write about?" "His dick." She gave me a sharp look and said, "That sounds like pornography." "No," my roommate said. "If he writes about other people's dicks, it's porn. But if it's his own, it's art. — Chris Offutt

What if, when Tracy Austin writes that after her 1989 car crash, 'I quickly accepted that there was nothing I could do about it,' the statement is not only true but exhaustively descriptive of the entire acceptance process she went through? — David Foster Wallace

The evening hour, too, gives us the irresponsibility which darkness and lamplight bestow," [Woolf] writes. "We are no longer quite ourselves. As we step out of the house on a fine evening between four and six, we shed the self our friens know us by and become part of that vast republican army of anonymous trampers, whose society is so agreeable after the solitude of one's own room." Here she describes a form of society that doesn't enforce identity but liberates it, the society of strangers, the republic of the streets, the experience of being anonymous and free that big cities invented. (Woolf's Darkness) — Rebecca Solnit

When my mother makes out her income tax return every year, under occupation she writes, eroding my daughter's self-esteem. — Robin Roberts

The author says that one of the difficulties of modern parenting is the uncertainty of what parents are preparing children for. In traditional societies this was clear, as parents prepared children for a society and for roles much like their own. She writes, There is no folk wisdom. — Jennifer Senior

A wise woman has already a rite
Where she knows right from left.
She usually writes when she's right
And always leaves before she's left. — Ana Claudia Antunes

A writer's pen depreciates with every word that it writes. Whereas she appreciates with every word that she writes. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Mary Fisher lives in a High Tower, on the edge of the sea: she writes a great deal about the nature of love. She tells lies. — Faye Weldon

It was a long time ago: 'Angela's Ashes' by Frank McCourt. It was a great story that was lasting, and I loved it so much. I also love Nora Ephron. I gobble up everything she writes. Also, I love Anthony Bourdain, very irreverent and funny. — Isabel Gillies

She writes things with her movements that I for the life of me could never write with a pen. — Christopher Poindexter

I want you to read 'God Sees the Truth, but Waits,' " said Mother. "Tolstoy writes about a man, wrongly accused of a murder, who spends the rest of his life in a prison camp. Twenty-six years later, as a convict in Siberia, he meets the true murderer and has an opportunity to free himself, but chooses not to. His longing for home leaves him and he dies." I ask Mother why this story matters to her. "Each of us must face our own Siberia," she says. "We must come to peace within our own isolation. No one can rescue us. My cancer is my Siberia." Suddenly, two white birds about the size of finches, dart in front of us and land on the snow. — Terry Tempest Williams

The wife has begun planning a secret life. In it, she is an art monster. She puts on yoga pants and says she is going to yoga, then pulls off onto a country lane and writes in tiny cramped writing on a grocery list She thinks she should go off her meds maybe so as to write more fluidly. Possibly this is not a good idea.
But only possibly. — Jenny Offill

Kate Atkinson is an absolute must-read. I love everything she writes. — Harlan Coben

She is a compassionate Amazon forming a muse from misery, full of graphic words, she doesn't hide, she speaks, she writes, she uses words that individualise her, she goes deeper and people cannot grasp her, they are frustrated, she is condemned because she is herself, she puts her self in the world and the world misunderstands her because she is uncomfortable. — Laura Gentile

That little Miley Cyrus ... she's like a little Elvis. The kids love her because she's Hannah Montana, but what people don't realize about her is she is such a fantastic singer and songwriter. She writes songs like she's 40 years old! — Dolly Parton

On international relations, Eleanor Roosevelt really takes a great shocking leadership position on the World Court. In fact, it amuses me. The very first entry in her FBI file begins in 1924, when Eleanor Roosevelt supports American's entrance into the World Court. And the World Court comes up again and again - '33, '35. In 1935, Eleanor Roosevelt goes on the air; she writes columns; she broadcast three, four times to say the US must join the World Court. — Blanche Wiesen Cook

She has learned to love. To fear. To hate. And then to love again. Through it all, she writes." ~Once Upon A Time There Was A Girl — Kimberly Kinrade

The ambition of 'Ten Thousand Saints,' Eleanor Henderson's debut novel about a group of unambitious lost souls, is beautiful. In nearly 400 pages, Henderson does not hold back once: she writes the hell out of every moment, every scene, every perspective, every fleeting impression, every impulse and desire and bit of emotional detritus. — Stacey D'Erasmo

When you were six you thought mistress meant to put your shoes on the wrong feet," she writes. "Now you are older and know it can mean many things, but essentially it means to put your shoes on the wrong feet. — Lorrie Moore

A plane flies overhead and inside it is a writer who has spent most of his life as a law clerk, even though he's always known deep down that he's a writer. For the first time, he's worked out what he wants to write, what the truth really is. He begs a napkin and a pen off the air hostess and he writes down the most beautiful sentence ever written, as the engine catches fire outside and the plane starts its plummet to the ground. It doesn't matter to him. It's the only sentence he's ever written and it is the last and no part of him cares. The sentence falls through the air with singed, black edges and comes to rest in a tree, in a park, miles away. One day, around ten years from now, an old widow of an astronaut will find it when a strong breeze finally blows it from its hiding place. She will read it and she will weep. — Pleasefindthis

Finally I had made that necessary imaginative leap - which is a real necessity, since most of us writers can't be out there living like crazy all the time. These days, very few are the writers whose book jackets list things like bush pilot, big game hunter, or exotic dancer. No, more often we are English teachers. We have children, we have mortgages, we have bills to pay. So we have to stop writing strictly about what we know, which is what they always told us to do in creative writing classes. Instead, we have to write about what we can learn, and what we can imagine, and thus we come to experience that great pleasure Anne Tyler noted when somebody asked her why she writes, and she answered, I write because I want more than one life. — Lee Smith

There are so many remarkable playwrights working right now, that I see everything I can. Annie Baker is a genius, I'll see anything she writes. The same for Lynn Nottage, Cynthia Hopkins, and Lisa D'Amour. Anything they've got going on, I'll go see. — Lucy Alibar

She was too wonderful a character to be allowed to die and I realize now that I should have allowed her to appear at hte end of my book. [Ray writes about the character Clarisse] — Ray Bradbury

You read the Miss Bea Haven column?" She sounded pleasantly surprised, almost flattered.
"Of course not. A column where the sexiest woman on earth pleasures herself with sex toys and then writes about it? Gross. — Tiffany Reisz

You're going to have people who are going to say 'Oh, you know like, she just writes songs about her ex-boyfriends' and I think frankly that's a very sexist angle to take. No one says that about Ed Sheeran. No one says it about Bruno Mars. They're all writing songs about their exes, their current girlfriends, their love-life, and no one raises a red flag there. — Taylor Swift

You see Miss Gertrude is a genius. And a genius is a genius. So what if no one understands a word she writes. Some day they might. — Jonah Winter

When she can't sleep, she writes. All she remembers is his words. It will soon be dawn, with fire-stoked horses thundering to the humming sky of crickets. I will see you run. And I will run with you. That morning, while Ata ate a dripping mango over the sink, she felt him come up behind her and touch the small of her back, light as a current of air. He kissed the side of her neck, inhaled the steam of bitter cocoa, boiling with bay leaves, cinnamon, and nutmeg, and said it reminded him of his childhood. "You are from the islands," she said. But then he was gone. — Oonya Kempadoo

Mrs. Todds my English teacher gives an automatic F if anyone ever writes "I woke up and it was all a dream" at the end of a story. She says it violates the deal between reader and writer, that it's a cop-out, it's the Boy Who Cried Wolf. But every single morning we really do wake up and it really was all a dream. — David Mitchell

Parents who experience pause from "the unnecessary beauty of an ice storm coating trees," while their kids - who "bewilder well," she writes - are simply looking for something to throw. — Durga Chew-Bose

What marks a writer is this: until she - or he, of course - writes down whatever happened, turns it into a story, it hasn't really happened, it hasn't shape, form, reality. — Carolyn Heilbrun

In an ideal state of society we never lose sight of the womanliness of women ... why should it be considered a compliment to any woman to be told she writes, paints, sings, talks, or even thinks, like a man? — Elizabeth Wordsworth

Loneliness is necessary for pure poetry. When someone intrudes into the poet's life (and any sudden personal contact, whether in the bed or in the heart, is an intrusion) the poet loses his or her balance for a moment, slips into being what he or she is, uses his or her poetry as one would use money or sympathy. The person who writes the poetry emerges, tentatively, like a hermit crab from a conch shell. The poet, for that instant, ceases to be a dead person. — Jack Spicer

Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one women writes a letter, and my whole world falls to pieces.
You see, she is an ordinary woman. A good one, even. That's the point ... Nothing [a recognizably bad person does] can surprise or shock me, or worry me. But she denounced Julia and sent her to her death because she resented her, and because Julia is a Jew.
I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the [Nazi] Germans are merely the supreme expression of it. — Iain Pears

And I think Taylor Swift is just an exemplary young lady. It's kind of interesting to see what a profound songwriter she is. I don't even think anyone has realized, the long term is going to be the bigger revelation. It's incredible how quickly she writes songs. We've hung out a couple times, we live near each other in Nashville. — Reese Witherspoon

God is everything that is good, she writes. All life's pleasures and comforts are sacramental; they are God's hands touching us. — Julian Of Norwich

One of the best things I've read about that inexplicably, but endlessly, fascinating group of people, the so-called Serious Collectors of 78s. Petrusich burrows into not just their personalities but the hunger that unites and drives their obsessions. She writes elegantly, and makes you think, and most important manages to hang onto her skepticism in the midst of her own collecting quest. — John Jeremiah Sullivan

Love your material. Nothing frightens the inner critic more than the writer who loves her work. The writer who is enamored of her material forgets all about censoring herself. She doesn't stop to wonder if her book is any good, or who will publish it, or what people will think. She writes in a trance, losing track of time, hearing only her characters in her head. — Allegra Goodman

It's a little scary when you - I got - I just got a box to my house for my birthday from this girl who writes - I mean it's a box of like - just like body lotions and stuff like this. And like this little box of dog toys in there. There's - you name it, candles, it's like this little box that she put together for my birthday. But she wrote in it and it came to my house. — Hayden Panettiere

If you are not the free person you want to be you must find a place to tell the truth about that. To tell how things go for you. Candor is like a skein being produced inside the belly day after day, it has to get itself woven out somewhere. You could whisper down a well. You could write a letter and keep it in a drawer. You could inscribe a curse on a ribbon of lead and bury it in the ground to lie unread for thousands of years. The point is not to find a reader, the point is the telling itself. Consider a person standing alone in a room. The house is silent. She is looking down at a piece of paper. Nothing else exists. All her veins go down into this paper. She takes her pen and writes on it some marks no one else will ever see, she bestows on it a kind of surplus, she tops it off with a gesture as private and accurate as her own name — Anne Carson

Jodi Byrd writes: "The story of the new world is horror, the story of America a crime." It is necessary, she argues, to start with the origin of the United States as a settler-state and its explicit intention to occupy the continent. These origins contain the historical seeds of genocide. Any true history of the United States must focus on what has happened to (and with) Indigenous peoples - and what still happens. — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

You were right the first time, Cathy. It was a stupid, silly story.
Ridiculous! Only insane people would die for the sake of love. I'll
bet you a hundred to one a woman wrote that junky romantic trash!"
Just a minute ago I'd despised that author for bringing about such a
miserable ending, then there I went, rushing to the defense. "T. M.
Ellis could very well have been a man! Though I doubt any woman writer
in the nineteenth century had much chance of being published, unless
she used her initials, or a man's name. And why is it all men think
everything a woman writes is trivial or trashy-or just plain silly
drivel? Don't men have romantic notions? Don't men dream of finding
the perfect love? And it seems to me, that Raymond was far more
mushy-minded than Lily! — V.C. Andrews

And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is woman's whole existence. And if we look for a moment at Orlando writing at her table, we must admit that never was there a woman more fitted for that calling. Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretence of writing and thinking and begin at least to think of a gamekeeper (and as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody objects to a woman writing either) and make an assignation for Sunday dusk and Sunday dusk will come; and the gamekeeper will whistle under the window
all of which is, of course, the very stuff of life and the only possible subject for fiction. — Virginia Woolf

If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer? — Jennifer Weiner

Putting the pastries onto a large tray, I asked Manna if she envisioned the words to her poems in colors. Nabokov writes in his autobiography that he and his mother saw the letters of the alphabet in color, I explained. He says of himself that he is a painterly writer.
The Islamic Republic coarsened my taste in colors, Manna said, fingering the discarded leaves of her roses. I want to wear outrageous colors, like shocking pink or tomato red. I feel too greedy for colors to see them in carefully chosen words of poetry. — Azar Nafisi