That's All She Wrote Quotes & Sayings

There were musicians that influenced me, but they weren't all women. Teena Marie was a big influence because she wrote and produced her own music, which let me know that women could write and produce their own music, which was an empowering moment for me. — Queen Latifah

A friend of mine once wrote a silly article about all these metrosexuals like David Beckham wearing sarongs, and she described me as a 'heteropolitan.' I don't know what that means. I think it was a joke. — Kevin McCloud

Well just meeting J. K. Rowling was amazing because she created all this world. And all the fans, we all get so obsessed with it and then you met the one person who made it all up. It was just so amazing. And I was just so amazed that that she wrote this book and all of the films have happened. — Evanna Lynch

Offstage, she fixed him in place with compliments and ironic bossiness, and he tended not to look at her at all when they spoke. He was the only one in the band she called by name, implying a permanence to his position that was professionally reassuring but personally debilitating. When they wrote together or when one presented the other with something prepared in private, with no audience to absorb the excess, he felt the room crowding with their other selves, lives unled and correspondences unwritten, happiness opted against, and he could not believe she did not see it, too. He sweated to ornament her fears and tall tales and fake portraits, and with the remnants of his energy he hid the rest of himself from her. The best of him was a child's drawing of her on an off day. — Arthur Phillips

He was a self-righteous know-it-all who had the breath of a dung beetle, a gray ponytail he barely pulled together from the bozo ring of hair clinging to his balding, freckled dome, and loved to drink, of all things, tea. Usually it was some sickly sweet-smelling herbal crap that was made in the hippie wasteland of Boulder, Colorado. The box was festooned with the image of a happy, dancing bear in a field of multicolored flowers and the tea had some idiotic name like Tai Chai. After work one evening, I snatched the box of tea bags from the break room and changed the recipe. I wasn't really worried that any other employees would use one of the tea bags because NO ONE DRINKS FUCKING TEA AT WORK, especially not the totally useless, noncaffeinated fairy tears reserved for old maids to sip while they watch Murder, She Wrote in bed with their legion of cats. — Shane Kuhn

Here was a woman about the year 1800 writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote, I thought, looking at Antony and Cleopatra; and when people compare Shakespeare and Jane Austen, they may mean that the minds of both had consumed all impediments; and for that reason we do not know Jane Austen and we do not know Shakespeare, and for that reason Jane Austen pervades every word that she wrote, and so does Shakespeare. — Virginia Woolf

Lord Salisbury's basic educational philosophy was that higher authority could, at best, have only a marginal effect; real desire to learn had to come from within. "N. has been very hard put to it for something to do," he wrote of a son who had been left alone with him for a few days at Hatfield. "Having tried all the weapons in the gun-cupboard in succession - some in the riding room and some, he tells me, in his own room - and having failed to blow his fingers off, he has been driven to reading Sydney Smith's Essays and studying Hogarth's pictures." Lady Salisbury did not share her husband's detached approach. "He may be able to govern the country," she said, "but he is quite unfit to be left in charge of his children. — Robert K. Massie

Have you ever read any Hannah Arendt?" I must look lost, because he explains further. "She's a political theorist."
" Anyway, she wrote this book about the trial of a Nazi lieutenant named Adolf Eichmann in the 1960s. Arendt was a Jew who left Germany during Hitler's reign, and during the trial this guy had to face up to all the atrocities he committed. Things only a monster could conceive of. However, he was examined by psychologists, and it was determined that he wasn't a psychopath, that in fact he was entirely normal. This left Arendt to determine that perfectly ordinary, everyday people were capable of crimes normally associated with only the most depraved, wicked members of society. She called it the banality of evil. — L. H. Cosway

As she watched all of this, Liesel was certain that these were the poorest souls alive. That's what she wrote about them ... Some looked appealingly at those who had come to observe their humiliation, this prelude to their deaths. Others pleaded for someone, anyone to step forward and catch them in their arms.
No one did. — Markus Zusak

Our teacher made us write a story about what we want to be when we're big," Noah tells him.
"What did you write?"
"I wrote that I wanted to concentrate on being little first."
"That's a very good answer."
"Isn't it? I would rather be old than a grown-up. All grown-ups are angry, it's just children and old people who laugh."
"Did you write that?"
"Yes."
"What did your teacher say?"
"She said I hadn't understood the task."
"And what did you say?"
"I said she hadn't understood my answer. — Fredrik Backman

And I think of Emily Dickinson, and my favorite poem about death, and the line that reads "I could not see to see." This is the line Ms. Sylvia copied onto the board in her beautiful cursive, which spirals away like blindweed tendrils, and then she asked the class what it might mean. I didn't even have to think about it. I just knew. To see to see, which is not exactly what Dickinson wrote, means knowing how to look. How to look to understand. How to look without your eyes. And to die, is not to see at all. Of course, I didn't actually say this out loud. — Sarah Elizabeth Schantz

You know what Hans told me last week?" she says as I open the door of my fitting room. "He told me to write down a list of everything I wanted to say about that women-and then tear it up. He said I'd feel a sense of freedom."
"Oh right," I say interestedly. "So what happened?"
"I wrote it all down," says Laurel. "And then I mailed it to her! — Sophie Kinsella

That evening, Hope wrote a letter to her MP, Jack Crow. She found no difficulty at all in composing it, but quite a bit in writing it. She hadn't hand-written an entire page since primary school. In the end she found an app on her glasses that sampled her handwriting and turned it into a font that looked like her handwriting would if it had been regular, and printed it off. There was even an app for the printer that indented the paper a little, and an ink that looked like ballpoint ink. — Ken MacLeod

All this is probably for nothing,' she [her mother] said once we'd hatched the plan. 'Most likely I'll flunk out anyway.' To prepare, she shadowed me during the last months of my senior year of high school, doing all the homework that I was assigned, honing her skills. She replicated my worksheets, wrote the same papers I had to write, read every one of the books. I graded her work, using my teacher's marks as a guide. I judged her a shaky student at best.
She went to college and earned straight As — Cheryl Strayed

My mother said the bizarre name Raccoona had surely been inspired, at least on a subliminal level, by the masks raccoons don't wear but simply have - the ones given them by nature ... [S]he pointed out that Le Guin had suspected all along that Raccoona and Tiptree were two authors that came from the same source, but in a letter to Alice she wrote that she preferred Tiptree to Raccoona: 'Raccoona, I think, has less control, thus less wit and power.'
Le Guin, Mother said, had understood something deep. 'When you take on a male persona, something happens.'
When I asked her what that was, she sat back in her chair, waved her arm, and smiled. 'You get to be the father. — Siri Hustvedt

Once a little boy sent me a charming card with a little drawing on it. I loved it. I answer all my children's letters - sometimes very hastily - but this one I lingered over. I sent him a card and I drew a picture of a Wild Thing on it. I wrote, "Dear Jim: I loved your card." Then I got a letter back from his mother and she said, "Jim loved your card so much he ate it." That to me was one of the highest compliments I've ever received. He didn't care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it. — Maurice Sendak

Take the Long Way Home is a song that I wrote that's on two levels - on one level I'm talking about not wanting to go home to the wife, 'take the long way home' because she treats you like part of the furniture. But there's a deeper level to the song, too. I really believe we all want to find our true home, find that place in us where we feel at home, and to me, home is in the heart. When we're in touch with our heart and we're living our life from our heart, then we do feel like we found our home. — Roger Hodgson

Years ago someone wrote [about me]: 'She characterizes Molly Weasley as a mother who is only at home looking after the children.' I was deeply offended, because I until a year before that had also been such a mother who was at home all the time taking care of her child [ ... ] What has lesser status and is more difficult than raising a child? And what is more important? — J.K. Rowling

While the others chatted over their parcels Jean wrote her letter, and Jean could write delightful letters. She had a decided talent in that respect, and her correspondents all declared her letters to be things of beauty and joy forever. She — L.M. Montgomery

Life is amazingly simplified," she wrote in her journal, "now that the recalcitrant forsythia has at last decided to come and blurt out springtime in petalled fountains of yellow. In spite of reams of papers to be written, life has snitched a cocaine sniff of sun-worship and salt air, and all looks promising." She already adored New York. — Elizabeth Winder

Emma took the revelation, on polygamy supposed she had all there was; but Joseph had wisdom enough to take care of it, and he had handed the revelation to Bishop Whitney, and he wrote it all off ... She went to the fireplace and put it in, and put a candle under it and burnt it, and she thought that was the end of it, and she will be damned as sure as she is a living woman. Joseph used to say that he would have her hereafter, if he had to go to hell for her, and he will have to go to hell for her as sure as he ever gets her. — Brigham Young

That's not to say that all software project management books are crap. Just most of them. One of the few that I've found compelling enough to finish is Johanna Rothman's "Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management." She co-wrote it with Esther Derby. — Jeff Atwood

Soy milk and two sugars." Just this past week, Rachel had become convinced that how people took their coffee gave some secret insight into their characters. Were people who took their coffee black unyielding? Did people who liked their coffee with milk and no sugar have mother issues? She had a notebook behind the coffee counter in which she wrote her findings. Willa decided to keep her on her toes by making up a different request every day.
Rachel walked back to the coffee bar to write that down in her notebook. "Hmm, interesting," she said seriously, as if it made all the sense in the world, as if she'd finally figured Willa out.
"You don't believe in ghosts, but you do believe that how I take my coffee says something about my personality?"
"That's superstition. This is science. — Sarah Addison Allen

But Ruth has not read all the letters I've written to her. She couldn't. Though I wrote them for her, I also wrote them for me, after all, and after she passed away, I placed another box beside the original. In this box are letters written with a shaking hand, letters marked only by my tears, not hers. They are letters written on what would have been yet another anniversary. Sometimes I think about reading them, just as she used to, but it hurts me to think that she never had the chance. — Nicholas Sparks

My older sister encouraged me from early on and bought me one of the first guitars I had. She listened to all of the crappy songs that I wrote when I was 8 years old and encouraged me to keep doing it. — Tracy Chapman

That's the point of miracles - to point us beyond our world to another world. They are clues that that other world is not in our imaginations but is actually out there, wherever "out there" actually is. Peggy Noonan once wrote that she thought miracles existed "in part as gifts and in part as clues that there is something beyond the flat world we see." If miracles exist at all, they exist not for their own sake but for us, to point us toward something beyond. To someone beyond. — Eric Metaxas

And all of Laura's stuff, what they wrote originally wasn't as good and Constance wound up doing that herself. That was all her stuff, reading to the child, because she had children herself and that's what she would have done. — William Devane

Dear Charles, she wrote.
After writing to express my appreciation for all the generosity of our friends, I would be remiss indeed if I did not include a missive to you. Out of all the new blessings in my new life, the one I thank God for the most is you. I thank you for writing to me through Genteel Correspondence, and for choosing me out of all the other women eager for adventure in the wild west.
I thank you for your kindness, and your gentleness toward me. Only very strong men can be gentle. I thank you for sharing your home and your life with me. I thank you for inventing delicious breakfasts. And chicory flavored coffee. And prayers that ease my mind and inspire my spirit and lift my heart. For your smile and the way you hold your hat in your hands. For the things you say and how you say them.
Did you know that I pray for you each day? I do. I pray for your safety and happiness.
Yours in Christ,
Rose — Jan Holly

In the 'Life' of George Eliot, John Walter Cross gave an intriguing account of Eliot's creative method. "She told me that, in all her best writing, there was a 'not herself' which took possession of her, and that she felt her own personality to be merely the instrument through which this spirit, as it were, was acting," Cross wrote. — Rebecca Mead

Dimity said, "I wrote him poetry!"
( ... ) "Dimity," Sophronia said, horrified by such an admission, "you didn't give him the poetry, did you?"
"Certainly not."
Sidheag tilted back in her chair, grinning. "Well, let's hear it."
"Oh, no. I don't think that's a good idea at all."
But Dimity was already dipping into her reticule and pulling out a scrap of paper. She gave it to Sidheag, who read it with a perfectly straight face, her tawny eyes dancing, and then passed it Sophronia.
"My love is like a red red rose
Occasionally he has a red red nose
He could keep me warm in the snows
I wager he has very nice toes."
Sophronia could think of nothing to say except, "Oh, Dimity. — Gail Carriger

As a matter of fact, Janice wrote Preacher a letter in red ink on lace-trimmed paper in which she told him he was vile beyond all human beings and words, that she considered their engagement broken, that he could have back the stuffed squirrel he'd given her. Preacher, saying he wanted to act nice, stopped her the next time she passed our house, and said, well, hell, she could keep that old squirrel if she wanted to. Afterwards, he couldn't understand why Janice ran away bawling the way she did. — Truman Capote

Lots of people wrote to the magazine to say that Marilyn vos Savant was wrong, even when she explained very carefully why she was right. Of the letters she got about the problem, 92% said that she was wrong and lots of these were from mathematicians and scientists. Here are some of the things they said: 'I'm very concerned with the general public's lack of mathematical skills. Please help by confessing your error.' -Robert Sachs, Ph.D., George Mason University ... 'I am sure you will receive many letters from high school and college students. Perhaps you should keep a few addresses for future columns.' -W. Robert Smith, Ph.D., Georgia State University ... 'If all those Ph.D.'s were wrong, the country would be in very serious trouble.' -Everett Harman, Ph.D., U.S. Army Research Institute — Mark Haddon

I can remember her singing, the thrill of it," she said. "She was one of my first inspirations.The people around me provided all the inspiration I needed. Everything I wrote (at that time) came from that experience, what I observed happening around me. — Taylor Swift

Maisie was next, and stepped up to vote. She wondered how many hands had trembled already today, holding their pencils over the ballots, with all the little boxes. Did most women take to their new, belated right with aplomb, or did they take their time, marveling over the beauty of it all, the silent speech that would be heard?
Or did they think, like she did, that there was a long queue behind her and she had to get to work.
She wrote a thick X, drew over it twice, and dropped the paper in the ballot box.
That's how you spell a shout. With an X. — Sarah Jane Stratford

Virginia Woolf wrote, "Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword." On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where all is correct. But on the other side of that sword, if you're crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, "all is confusion." Nothing follows a regular course. Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will be more perilous. — Elizabeth Gilbert

She [Justice sandra Day O'Connor] wrote - and this is one we should all remember - she wrote that even war is not a blank check for the president when it comes to the rights of the nation's citizens. She held that even this president is not above the law. — Patrick Leahy

Sometimes, what people choose to write down on paper is more important than what they say.
Caleb didn't know what Sarah meant. But I knew. I wrote in my journal every night. And when I read what I had written, I could see myself there, clearer than when I looked in the mirror. I could see all of us: Papa, who couldn't always say the things he felt; Caleb, who said everything; and Sarah, who didn't know that she had changed us all. — Patricia MacLachlan

so thanks for supplying all the inspiration." "But think of everything you came up with all on your own," she said. "You would have done just fine without me. I wish I had your imagination. What's your secret to making a story so good? Do you have any writing tricks or rituals?" Conner had never thought about it before. He thought back to the very first time he wrote a story and recalled a tool that had helped him write ever since. "Whenever I write, I imagine everything in Dad's voice," he said. "I try to describe everything with the same energy and enthusiasm he had when he read stories to us. Sometimes when I miss him the most, writing makes me feel like he's there with me. — Chris Colfer

It was in this man's class that I first began to wonder if people who wrote fiction were not suffering from some kind of disorder--from what I've since come to think of, remembering the wild nocturnal rocking of Albert Vetch, as the midnight disease. The midnight disease is a kind of emotional insomnia; at every conscious moment its victim--even if he or she writes at dawn, or in the middle of the afternoon--feels like a person lying in a sweltering bedroom, with the window thrown open, looking up at a sky filled with stars and airplanes, listening to the narrative of a rattling blind, an ambulance, a fly trapped in a Coke bottle, while all around him the neighbors soundly sleep. this is in my opinion why writers--like insomniacs--are so accident-prone, so obsessed with the calculus of bad luck and missed opportunities, so liable to rumination and a concomitant inability to let go of a subject, even when urged repeatedly to do so. — Michael Chabon

I mean, if you pause over what it means at the age of 76 that Eleanor Roosevelt wrote, the happiest single day of her life was the day she made the first team at field hockey. Field hockey is a team sport. Field hockey is a knockabout - I mean, picture Allenswood, the swamps of north London. It's a messy sport. So she really enjoyed playing this rough-and-tumble sport in the mud of Allenswood, a team sport. And she was very competitive. And she loved being competitive, and she loved to win. And that, I think, was all of the things that Allenswood enabled. — Blanche Wiesen Cook

If I could be anyone, I'd be Abigail Adams." "Because she did it all?" he asked. "Because she was glad to do it all and never complained, that's how committed she was to what John was doing. I know - as a woman, a feminist, I'm not supposed to admire a woman who'd do all that for a man, but she was doing it for herself. As if that was the contribution she could make to the founding of America. And they wrote each other letters - not just romantic, loving letters, but letters asking each other for advice. They were first good friends, two people who respected each other's brains, and then obviously lovers, since they had a slew of kids. True partners, long before true partners were fashionable. — Robyn Carr

Both Yassi and I know that we have been losing our faith. We have been questioning it with every move. During the Shah's time, it was different. I felt I was in the minority and I had to guard my faith against all odds. Now that my religion is in power, I feel more helpless than ever before, and more alienated.' She wrote about how ever since she could remember, she had been told that life in the land of infidels was pure hell. She had been promised that all would be different under a just Islamic rule. Islamic rule! It was a pageant of hypocrisy and shame. — Azar Nafisi

She was a Florida snowbird archetype, about eighty, permed to perfection, and as darkly tanned as a cordovan shoe. She looked at me, looked away, then did a double take. "I know you," she said. "You're Stephen King. You write those scary stories. That's all right, some people like them, but not me. I like uplifting stories, like that Shawshank Redemption." "I wrote that too," I said. "No you didn't," she said, and went on her way. — Stephen King

I honestly feel that "Murder, She Wrote" stands alone, as many of the other great shows of the past 35, 40 years do. It stands alone, and it's still on. It's still all over the world, "Murder, She Wrote," Jessica Fletcher and "Murder, She Wrote." — Angela Lansbury

There are so many great artists out there; it's hard to choose one. But, I would love to work with Ledisi; she has a great voice. I also admire and respect John Legend. When he wrote "All of Me," I fell in love with the melody and music. He is an artist that really loves music and just has a great way with words. — Heather Headley

I have on my office wall a wise and useful reminder by Anne Morrow Lindbergh concerning one of the realities of life. She wrote, "My life cannot implement in action the demands of all the people to whom my heart responds." That's good counsel for us all, not as an excuse to forgo duty, but as a sage point about pace and the need for quality in relationships. — Neal A. Maxwell

Woke the next day and found her note. Love ya, goodbye, that's all she wrote. — David Gates

These are the last things, she wrote. One by one they disappear and never come back. I can tell you of the ones I have seen, of the ones that are no more, but I doubt there will be time. It is all happening too fast now, and I cannot keep up. — Paul Auster

There was a boy down at the stables." She laughed suddenly with her back comfortably nestled against Grant's chest. "Oh,Lord,he was a bit like Will, all sharp,awkward edges."
"You were crazy about him."
"I'd spend hours mucking out stalls and grooming horses just to get a glimpse of him.I wrote pages and pages about him in my diary and one very mushy poem."
"And kept it under your pillow."
"Apparently you've had a nodding aquaintance with twelve-year-old girls."
He thought of Shelby and grinned, resting his chin on the top of her head. Her hair smelled as though she'd washed it with rain-drenched wildflowers. "How long did it take you to get him to kiss you?"
She laughed. "Ten days.I thought I'd discovered the answer to the mysteries of the universe.I was a woman."
"No female's more sure of that than a twelve-year-old. — Nora Roberts

The next year had seen them drop into the crazy-obsessive love spiral in which they'd break up and then not be able to stay away from each other, until one time she was able to stay away, and that was all she wrote. — David Foster Wallace

So I went to history, where I paid a little attention,French, where I paid none, and then to art.
I convinced Ms. Evers that I (a) would benefit from outside time, and (b) should be excused from all further classes because I was running out of time at the archive and I needed to be there ASAP. I have no idea if she believed me. She wrote me a note anyway. — Melissa Jensen

After listening to everyone rumble with both their pain and their privilege, the white woman who wrote the "you don't know me" note said, "I get it, but I can't spend my life focusing on the negative things - especially what the black and Hispanic students are talking about. It's too hard. Too painful." And before anyone could say a word, she had covered her face with her hands and started to cry. In an instant, we were all in that marshy, dark delta with her. She wiped her face and said, "Oh my God. I get it: I can choose to be bothered when it suits me. I don't have to live this every day." I chose to use my social work — Brene Brown

The biggest myth about comedy is that it's magical, unknowable, unteachable. Those who subscribe to that myth believe that the world is divided into two parts: those who are funny, and those who ain't. And if you ain't, well, sorry Charley, that's all she wrote. I have a simple response to that: Bull. — Steven Kaplan

They may well have had a backup system, but if it crashed at the same time as their main system, then that's all she wrote,' Riker said. 'Excuse mee, sir' said Data. 'That's all who wrote?' 'It's merely an expression, Mr. Data,' said Picard. 'It means that was the end of it. There was nothing they could do.' 'That's all she wrote' repeated Data. He nodded. 'Yes, I see. She, in this case, doubtless referring to the human conceptualization of Fate, writing a final chapter, as it were, and putting a period to the-' 'Please, Mr. Data,' Picard said impatiently. — Simon Hawke

Sometimes I'll say, "I wrote that book," and the person will look at you as if you're really strange. One time that happened to my daughter on a plane. She was sitting next to a girl who was reading one of my books and my daughter said, "My mother wrote that book." And the girl started to quiz my daughter, asking her all sorts of questions, like what are the names of Judy's children and where did she grow up. My daughter thought it was so funny. — Judy Blume

That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. "It's all right," he said. "But I'd take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That's about used up, I should think. — Wallace Stegner

Katie Dippold, who I wrote the script with, she's very into ghosts and all that. So I go, "Hey, why don't you talk to Katie?" — Paul Feig

She wrote poetry constantly; that was her "work". She was a slow bleeder and she slaved over it for long, exhausting hours, and many a middle of a night I could hear her creaking around the dead house with a pen in one hand, a clipboard and a flashlight in the other, refining her poems, jotting down the lines of a conceit. Writing never came easy for her; it gave her calluses. She never courted the muses, she wrestled them, mauled them all over the house and came up, after weeks of peripatetic labor, with a slim Spencerian sonnet, fourteen lines of imagistic jabberwocky. — Millard Kaufman

Jeanne sensed herself becoming more depressed after tweeting. She felt lonely after all of her thoughts had left her and were now staring at her on the Internet. Jeanne sometimes felt fearful of posting her thoughts on twitter. After posting a thought to twitter she sometimes thought, "No, I should have saved that." Jeanne felt unsure as to why she would need to save her thoughts. Maybe she needed to somehow save up all of her thoughts like carnival tickets, and she would be able to one day trade them in for one big, good thing. She could possible trade them in for a giant stuffed animal with a disproportionately large head that is not a trademarked character but very similar looking to a trademarked character.

She thought that if she ever wrote a novel it would be made up of every thought she has ever had. She would title it "One Big Good Thing" even if it were small and bad. — Gabby Bess

But here's the thing Ona. Howard wrote that song for you.' Quinn had never been more sure of anything. 'I think he wrote all his songs for you, Ona, for young and lovely you.'
'Now you're talking foolish.'
'He wrote them for you, and you refused them because he didn't know how to give them to you.' How could he, living his shadow of a life, floundering in the sludge of grief and failure?
'Have you been drinking?'
'Listen to me,' he said. 'You 're the glittering girl with the cherry-wood hair. You're the angel's breath and sunlight.'
'Oh, for heaven's sake.' She sat up crossly, her tufted hair seeming to quiver. 'Quinn Porter,' she said, 'I never took you for a romantic.'
'Howard Stanhope loved you,' he declared. 'I thought you should know.'
'Well, all right.'
'I thought you should know, Ona.'
'Thank you.'
'People should know these things — Monica Wood

At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously ... That's why my Grandmother Clara wrote in her notebooks, in order to see things in their true dimension and to defy her own poor memory. — Isabel Allende

I wrote stories from the time I was a little girl, but I didn't want to be a writer. I wanted to be an actress. I didn't realize then that it's the same impulse. It's make-believe. It's performance. The only difference being that a writer can do it all alone. I was struck a few years ago when a friend of ours - an actress - was having dinner here with us and a couple of other writers. It suddenly occurred to me that she was the only person in the room who couldn't plan what she was going to do. She had to wait for someone to ask her, which is a strange way to live. — Joan Didion

Nadya Zelenin and her mother had returned from a performance of Eugene Onegin at the theatre. Going into her room, the girl swiftly threw off her dress and let her hair down. Then she quickly sat at the table in her petticoat and white bodice to write a letter like Tatyana's.
'I love you,' she wrote, 'but you don't love me, you don't love me!'
Having written this, she laughed.
She was only sixteen and had never loved anyone yet. She knew that Gorny (an army officer) and Gruzdyov (a student) were both in love with her, but now, after the opera, she wanted to doubt their love. To be unloved and miserable: what an attractive idea! There was something beautiful, touching and romantic about A loving B when B wasn't interested in A. Onegin was attractive in not loving at all, while Tatyana was enchanting because she loved greatly. Had they loved equally and been happy they might have seemed boring.
("After The Theatre") — Anton Chekhov

The only distinguishing characteristic of a literature professor at the millennium was that he or she wrote about other people's writing. Apart from that, the writing he wrote about didn't even need to be literature, or writing about literature, or even writing about writing about literature. He needed theory...In the unflickering glare, at the center of a severe perspective, Nelson suddenly felt the visceral truth of the world as text; he apperceived the fundamentally linguistic nature of reality. Everything was text, at every level of existence, all the way up from quarks to queer theory. Words arranged in lines; lines arrayed on pages; pages pressed together, bound, and trimmed in books; books arranged cover to cover along a shelf like the words in a line of text; shelves stacked one atop the other like lines of text on a page; rows of shelves pressed together, with just the barest passage for the reader, like the pages of a book. — James Hynes

My eye is still used to searching for her in a crowd. My breath is still used to catching when I see her and the light is angled just right. My body is still used to hers moving next to mine. So the distance - anything short of contact - is a constant rejection. We were together for six months, and in each of those months my desire found new ways to be fueled by her. It's over can't kill that. All of the songs I wrote in my head were for her, and now I can't stop them from playing. This null soundtrack. I'm tired, she'd said, and I told her that I was tired, too, and that I wanted to take some time for us, too. And then she'd said, No, I'm tired of you, and I slipped into the surreal-but-true universe where we were over and I wasn't over it. She was no longer any kind of here that I could get to — David Levithan

The next minute he realized what had happened to him, but not before she'd caught him staring.
For a decade, I was fixated by her beauty. I wrote an entire article on the evolutionary significance of beauty as a rebuke to myself, that I, who understood the concepts so well, nevertheless could not escape the magnetic pull of one particular woman's beauty.
She knew. With surgical precision, she had peeled back his layers of defenses, until his heart lay bare before her, all its shame and yearning exposed.
He could have lived with this if only he'd kept his secret whole and buried. But she knew. She knew. — Sherry Thomas

This one's for Aura.
You all know who that is by now. The only girl I've ever loved. I wrote her a song, but she's the only one who's ever heard it, or ever will. — Jeri Smith-Ready

My wife is my first reader, my first line of defence I suppose. So she says, "Oh well, oh yes, it's all true." At the same time, I could have written much more about us, but I didn't want to go any further. I did cut things out. There are certain things that I wrote about her that are so gushing with praise and admiration that when I looked at those passages I realised they would be ridiculous to anybody else. — Paul Auster

She wrote she heard them hammering nails all day long and that it was like living next to a coffin maker after a plague. When — Joe Hill

I put my hand on the altar rail. 'What if ... what if Heaven is real, but only in moments? Like a glass of water on a hot day when you're dying of thirst, or when someone's nice to you for no reason, or ... ' Mam's pancakes with Toblerone sauce; Dad dashing up from the bar just to tell me, 'Sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite'; or Jacko and Sharon singing 'For She's A Squishy Marshmallow' instead of 'For She's A Jolly Good Fellow' every single birthday and wetting themselves even though it's not at all funny; and Brendan giving his old record player to me instead of one of his mates. 'S'pose Heaven's not like a painting that's just hanging there for ever, but more like ... Like the best song anyone ever wrote, but a song you only catch in snatches, while you're alive, from passing cars, or ... upstairs windows when you're lost ... — David Mitchell

Georgia took once a creative-writing course, and what the instructor told her was: Too many things. Too many things going on at the same time; also too many people. Think, he told her. What is the important thing? What do you want us to pay attention to? Think.
Eventually she wrote a story that was about her grandfather killing chickens, and the instructor seemed to be pleased with it. Georgia herself thought that it was a fake. She made a long list of all the things that had been left out and handed it in as an appendix to the story. The instructor said that she expected too much, of herself and of the process, and that she was wearing him out.
The course was not a total loss, because Georgia and the instructor ended up living together. — Alice Munro

See, the thing is I didn't think that that song would get much attention because it's such a personal song to me. I just wrote it about my childhood, and I didn't know how that would read on an album. But it's been everybody's favorite song. I didn't tell my mom. It was a total secret. So I wrote it in secret and then decided to record it secretly, so she had no idea that the song was recorded. My producers sent me the track and I synched it up to all my baby videos and I played it for her one Christmas Eve, and she bawled her eyes out. She didn't even think that it was my song. She didn't think there was any way for me to record a song without her knowing. — Taylor Swift

The techniques are all means of dealing with one simple idea: She wrote it. (That is, the "wrong" person
in this case, female
has created the "right" value
i.e., art.)
Denial of Agency: She didn't write it.
Pollution of Agency: She shouldn't have written it.
Double Standard of Content: Yes, but look what she wrote about.
False Categorizing: She is not really she [an artist] and it is not really it [serious, of the right genre, aesthetically sound, important, etc.] so how could "she" have written "it"?
Or simply: Neither "she" nor "it" exists (simple exclusion). — Joanna Russ

20. The day she graduated from college, Keegan told her mother that she was especially proud of her Yale Daily News article "Even Artichokes Have Doubts," which went on to be adapted for the New York Times and discussed on NPR. When The Opposite of Loneliness was first published in April 2014, columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote, "Keegan was right to prod us all to reflect on what we seek from life, to ask these questions, to recognize the importance of passions as well as paychecks - even if there are no easy answers." As Keegan reminds other young people that "we can do something really cool to this world" (p. 200), what points does she emphasize? What counterarguments might she have considered more specifically? Do you share her concern about where so many top young graduates take their first jobs? Do you worry that you need to compromise your own dreams for practical concerns? Why or why not? — Marina Keegan

She wanted to know what American writers I liked. "Hawthorne, Henry James, Emily Dickinson ... " "No, living." Ah, well, hmm, let's see: how difficult, the rival factor being what it is, for a contemporary author, or would-be author, to confess admiration for another. At last I said, "Not Hemingway - a really dishonest man, the closet-everything. Not Thomas Wolfe - all that purple upchuck; of course, he isn't living. Faulkner, sometimes: Light in August. Fitzgerald, sometimes: Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Tender Is the Night. I really like Willa Cather. Have you read My Mortal Enemy?" With no particular expression, she said, "Actually, I wrote it. — Truman Capote

Will and George were doing well in business, and Joe was writing letters home in rhymed verse and making as smart an attack on all the accepted verities as was healthful.

Samuel wrote to Joe, sayings, "I would be disappointed if you had not become an atheist, and I read pleasantly that you have, in your age and wisdom, accepted agnosticism the way you'd take a cookie on a full stomach. But I would ask you with all my understanding heart not to try to convert your mother. Your last letter only made her think you are not well. Your mother does not believe there are many ills uncurable by good strong soup. She puts your brave attack on the structure of our civilization down to a stomach ache. It worries her. Her faith is a mountain, and you, my son, haven't even got a shovel yet. — John Steinbeck

His name was Anderson and he had little gift for communication. Like most technicians, he had a
terror and a contempt for speculation. The inductive leap was not for him. He dug a step and pulled himself up one single step, the way a man climbs the last shoulder of a mountain. He had great contempt, born of fear, for the Hamiltons, for they all half believed they had wings - and they got some bad falls that way.
Anderson never fell, never slipped back, never flew. His steps moved slowly, slowly upward, and in the end, it is said, he found what he wanted - color film. He married Una, perhaps, because she had little humor, and this reassured him. Una wrote bleak letters without joy but also without self-pity. She was well and she hoped her family was well. — John Steinbeck

I got Mary pregnant and man that's all she wrote. And for my 19th birthday, I got a union card and a factory coat. — Bruce Springsteen

Bramble had taken another pencil from Delphinium, and Azalea's napkin, and wrote something new.
You're afraid of the King. Admit it.
Azalea grimaced at her untouched food, burning in humiliation as Lord Bradford took the napkin and read it. This time, he looked to be discreetly writing something back beneath the table.
Fairweller blinked at the King for a moment, in which Lord Bradford handed Bramble her napkin. She opened it and turned a rosy pink.
My lady, it read,who isn't?
Bramble pursed her lips and kicked Lord Bradford beneath the table-hard. His face twitched befre regaining its solemn expression.Azalea buried her face in her hands.
"All we ask is for you to consider it. That is all," said Fairweller.
"Oh." Lord Bradford's voice was slightly strangled. "Yes. Thank you."
Bramble threw the pencil-smudged napkin onto her plate. "I'm done," she said. "May we go to our room now? — Heather Dixon

Time, though you've probably lived all your life believing the contrary, is not money. If you run out of money, there are many ways to scrounge up more. If you run out of time - well, that's all she wrote. — Jay Conrad Levinson

And that love letter you wrote," Rowan added helpfully. "Signing it with another chap's name." Emma Smallwood's eyes widened, and she turned to look at him, brows high. Henry felt his neck heat. His cravat seemed suddenly far too tight. "That's right," Phillip nodded as the memory returned to him. "Pugsworth, was it not?" Julian grinned at Miss Smallwood, clearly enjoying himself. "Did you really think this Pugsworth fellow in love with you?" Heaven help him, Henry hoped she wouldn't burst into disillusioned tears. Not all these years later. And not over Milton Pugsworth. But Miss Smallwood remained her imperturbable self. "Goodness no," she said. "For all his faults, Mr. Pugsworth spelled exceptionally well and had the neatest hand I ever saw. Your brother, on the other hand, never did learn to spell. And I recognized his sloppy scratchings the moment I saw them." Phillip gave her a long look of amused approval. "Bravo, Emma. — Julie Klassen

My mother was addicted to being rich, to servants and unlimited charge accounts, to giving lavish dinner parties, to taking frequent first-class trips to Europe. So one might say she was tormented by withdrawal symptoms all through the Great Depression. She was acculturated! Acculturated persons are those who find that they are no longer treated as the sort of people they thought they were, because the outside world has changed. An economic misfortune or a new technology, or being conquered by another country or political faction, can do that to people quicker than you can say "Jack Robinson." As Trout wrote in his "An American Family Marooned on the Planet Pluto": "Nothing wrecks any kind of love more effectively than the discovery that your previously acceptable behavior has become ridiculous." He said in conversation at the 2001 clambake: "If I hadn't learned how to live without a culture and a society, acculturation would have broken my heart a thousand times." *** — Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

She was witchy, yes, and in charge of a cauldron roiling with ideas and stories, but she always gave the impression that the stories, the ones she wrote and wrote so very well and so wisely, had simply happened, and that all she had done was to hold the pen. (On Diana Wynne Jones) — Neil Gaiman

You don't wear jewelry, do you? Besides your wedding ring, I mean?'

'Now often. If is not that I disapprove. I simply don't take the time to bother with it. I've been given a few trinkets over the years, but rarely wear them.' Thora looked down at her hand, the plain thin wedding band, the unadorned wrist, and a memory struck her. She said, 'Frank gave me a gift once - a find gold bracelet with a blue enamel heart dangling from it. He said it was to remind me that I was more than his helpmeet and housekeeper, but also an attractive woman. I was sure I'd break the delicate chain, and the heart clacked against the desk whenever I wrote in the ledger. So I put it back in its box, and there it has remained ever since.'

Nan said gently, 'We've all been given gifts, Thors, and ought not to hide them away. They remind us that we are blessed and loved. They give pleasure to those who see them - especially to the one who bestowed the gift in the first place. — Julie Klassen

Well, it would be helpful to not have to go through all of these in Braille," the man said. "I'm looking for the local wildlife guide and one other book." He held a paper out in front of him, and she took it. "The head librarian wrote the authors' names down for me," the man said, grinning. "I don't think she realized I couldn't read it." "That would be my boss," Julia sighed. "She's ... she's the kind of person who yells at deaf people. — Aubrey Rose

Here Mrs. Wiggins, who had been slowing down gradually, came to a full stop. "Good land, Charles," she said, looking down at the rooster, "I can't remember all those big words. That was a real nice speech you wrote out for me, but I guess you'll just have to let me tell it in my own way." Charles — Walter R. Brooks

There are people, she once wrote, who think that we cannot rule ourselves because the few times we tried, we failed, as if all the others who rule themselves today got it right the first time. It is like telling a crawling baby who tries to walk, and then falls back on his buttocks, to stay there. As if the adults walking past him did not all crawl, once. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Bloomsbury lost Fry, in 1934, and Lytton Strachey before him, in January 1932, to early deaths. The loss of Strachey
was compounded by Carrington's suicide just two months after, in March. Another old friend, Ka Cox, died of a heart attack in 1938. But the death, in 1937, of Woolf 's nephew Julian, in the Spanish Civil War, was perhaps the
bitterest blow. Vanessa found her sister her only comfort: 'I couldn't get on at all if it weren't for you' (VWB2 203). Julian, a radical thinker and aspiring writer, campaigned all his life against war, but he had to be dissuaded by his
family from joining the International Brigade to fight Franco. Instead he worked as an ambulance driver, a role that did not prevent his death from shrapnel wounds. Woolf 's Three Guineas, she wrote to his mother, was
written 'as an argument with him — Jane Goldman

There was nowhere for her to go. Not in the kitchen, not in the hallway, not in the bedroom. What she wanted was a little room of her own where she could go and jot down small things in her diary. Tatiana had no little room of her own. As a result she had no diary. Diaries, as she understood them from books, were supposed to be full of personal writings and filled with private words. Well, in Tatiana's world there were no private words. All private thoughts you kept in your head as you lay down next to another person, even if that other person happened to be your sister. Leo Tolstoy, one of her favorite writers, wrote a diary of his life as a young boy, an adolescent, a young man. That diary was meant to be read by thousands of people. That wasn't the kind of diary Tatiana wanted to keep. She wanted to keep one in which she could write down Alexander's name and no one would read it. She wanted to have a room where she could say his name out loud and no one would hear it. Alexander. — Paullina Simons

I remember reading this thing that Elizabeth Taylor wrote. She had her first kiss in character. On a movie set. It really struck me. I don't know how or why, but I had this sense that if I wasn't really careful, that could be me: that my first kiss could be in somebody else's clothes. And my experiences could all belong to someone else. — Emma Watson

I know you," she said. "You're Stephen King. You write those scary stories. That's all right, some people like them, but not me. I like uplifting stories, like that Shawshank Redemption." "I wrote that too," I said. "No you didn't," she said, and went on her way. The — Stephen King

You think fairy tales are only for girls? Here's a hint - ask yourself who wrote them. I assure you, it wasn't just the women. It's the great male fantasy - all it takes is one dance to know that she's the one. All it takes is the sound of her song from the tower, or a look at her sleeping face. And right away you know - this is the girl in your head, sleeping or dancing or singing in front of you. Yes, girls want their princes, but boys want their princesses just as much. And they don't want a very long courtships. They want to know immediately. — David Levithan

Sydney: Can I ask you a question? Me: As long as you promise never again to start a question off with whether or not you can propose a question. Sydney: Okay, asshole. I know I shouldn't be thinking about him at all, but I'm curious. What did he wrote on that paper when we went to get my purse? And what did you write back that made hit you? Me: I agree that you shouldn't be thinking about him at all, but I'm honestly shocked it's taken you this long to ask me about it. Sydney: Well? Ugh. I hate writing it verbatim, but she wants to know, so ... Me: He wrote "Are you fucking her?" Sydney: OMG! What a prick! Me: Yep. Sydney: So what did you say back to him that made him punch you? Me: I write, "Why do you think I'm here for her purse? I gave her a hundred for tonight, and now she owes me change." I reread the text, and I'm not so sure it sounds as funny as I thought it did. — Colleen Hoover

They couldn't talk. They were not good talkers, either of them. And once, long ago now, she had bought a notebook for a course. It lay empty and forgotten on the kitchen table until one afternoon, when she had gone out to the shops and he was worried that she would be killed by a bus or by lightning, he opened the notebook and he wrote lines about how he loved her, the way he loved her, about his fucking heart and crap like that, about his body brimful and his scrambled head. All that. She came back from the shops. He left the notebook where it was, and he didn't mention it. And it wasn't until about a week later that he noticed it again, and he flicked it open, and he saw his lines followed by lines from her. She'd written words that she had never said. He sat down. He read them over and over for a long time. Then he wrote a paragraph for her to find. — Keith Ridgway

I'm the one who often makes the 'Murder, She Wrote' reference, and ABC hates that, they don't want me to do that. And I say that having never actually watched 'Murder, She Wrote'. I think people have been trying to compare it to crime shows that are on right now, and all I can do is listen. I don't watch a lot of TV. — Nathan Fillion

Irony is the disparity between what you expect will happen, and what does happen. So raining on your wedding day isn't ironic, it's just crappy. It would have been ironic if she had lived in a place like Seattle, and traveled to the desert of Mexico for a wedding and it ended up raining there, but not in Seattle. Alanis always gets the last laugh though. We all sit here, saying her song isn't ironic, but in fact, that's pretty ironic that she wrote a song called Ironic that wasn't really ironic. Those Canadians are pretty crafty. — Mo Rocca

But a day later, it was 'Prof Tim says low fat is a fraud,' when he was eating a tub of yoghurt at his desk for breakfast. He let that slide too. Until the following morning, when he and a packet of Simba salt-and-vinegar crisps walked out of the morning parade, and Mbali said, 'Prof Tim says it's the carbs that make you fat, you know,' and he couldn't take it any more and snapped: 'Prof Tim who?' And so she told him. Everything. About this Prof Tim Noakes who once got the whole fokken world eating pasta, and then he did an about face and said, no, carbs are what's making everyone obese, and he wrote a book of recipes, and now he was Mbali's big hero, 'Because it takes a great man to admit that he was wrong', and she had already lost so much weight and she had so much more energy, and it wasn't all that hard, she didn't miss the carbs because now she ate cauliflower rice and cauliflower mash and flax seed bread. Flax seed bread, for fuck's sake. — Deon Meyer

I tended to listen to doo-wop, but my grandmother would always have the radio on all day and she'd start with Yiddish and then move on to gospel and later to "make believe" ballroom music. I got to hear all kinds of music and my mother would get up to go to work listening to country music. That was her alarm clock. My dad was a jazz lover and listened to the man who wrote "Misty", Errol Garner. He loved piano players, so I got to listen to that as well. — Richie Havens

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

Well, Thanksgiving we'll all gather at my house for dinner and we usually do Christmas at Beau's house. My mom is still feisty and kicking. She's 92. I saw her last night and she published a book at 90. It's a wonderful book called "You Caught Me Kissing" and it's basically love-poems that she wrote for my dad. It's more than that, it's a wonderful book. — Jeff Bridges