Women Authors Quotes & Sayings

Something we do know is that review coverage does go to male authors more than women authors. That's a fact. I think it's one of those examples of unconscious bias: If you hire a lot of male journalists, they're more likely to pick up the latest Ian McEwan novel than the latest A.S. Byatt novel. — Emma Donoghue

Our peace is our purpose. — A.D. Posey

More than anything, I began to hate women writers. Frances Burney, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Browning, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf. Bronte, Bronte, and Bronte. I began to resent Emily, Anne, and Charlotte - my old friends - with a terrifying passion. They were not only talented; they were brave, a trait I admired more than anything but couldn't seem to possess. The world that raised these women hadn't allowed them to write, yet they had spun fiery novels in spite of all the odds. Meanwhile, I was failing with all the odds tipped in my favor. Here I was, living out Virginia Woolf's wildest feminist fantasy. I was in a room of my own. The world was no longer saying, "Write? What's the good of your writing?" but was instead saying "Write if you choose; it makes no difference to me. — Catherine Lowell

It is a sad paradox that when male authors impersonate women ... they are said to be dealing with 'cosmic, major concerns' - but when we impersonate ourselves we are said to be writing 'women's fiction' or 'women's poetry. — Erica Jong

Nordie's at Noon is an honest and inspiring testament to [these authors'] experiences which, I am completely confident ... will inspire thousands of women as it inspired me. — Elizabeth Edwards

I was once invited to the circuit court as an expert; during a break, one of my fellow experts drew my attention to the prosecutor's rude treatment of the defendants, among whom were two women of the intelligentsia. I don't think I was exaggerating in the least when I answered my colleague that this treatment was no more rude than that displayed towards each other by the authors of serious articles. Indeed, it is such rude treatment that one cannot speak of it without pain. Either they treat each other and the authors they criticize with excessive deference, forgetting all dignity, or the reverse, they handle them with greater boldness than I use in these notes, and in my thoughts, towards my future son-in-law Gnekker. — Anton Chekhov

The gift of beauty can be found in ugly feelings. — Deborah Sandella

I am satisfied that if a book is a good one, it is so whatever the sex of the author may be. All novels are or should be written for both men and women to read, and I am at a loss to conceive how a man should permit himself to write anything that would be really disgraceful to a woman, or why a woman should be censured for writing anything that would be proper and becoming for a man. — Anne Bronte

Love is written by the soul. — A.D. Posey

I don't strive on being the most beautiful woman in the room! I strive to be the most unique! The one who stands out, the one you will never forget. — Sahndra Fon Dufe

If you're colored, you get the short end of the stick. If you're a woman, you get the short end of the stick. So what do we get for being colored and women? — Sherri L. Smith

Transgender women do not think of themselves as men wearing women's clothing, they ARE women. — Cheryl B. Evans

Plays, gentlemen, are to their authors what children are to women: they cost more pain than they give pleasure. — Pierre Beaumarchais

Success or failure in your work and relationships is dependent on how you manage your feelings. — Deborah Sandella

Imagination is an extraordinary resource within each of us with powers not found in ordinary thought processes. — Deborah Sandella

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

My position at the Palace is our one opportunity. Have confidence in my destiny. Do not weep. — Shan Sa

I see God now as an unimaginative writer of popular fictions, someone who builds stories around sadistic and graceless plots, narratives that exist only to express His terror of a woman's power to choose who and how to love, to redefine love as she sees fit, not as God thinks it ought to be. The author is unworthy of His own characters. — Joe Hill

We have so politicized literature today, pigeonholing people into gay male fiction, lesbian fiction, transgender fiction and then other sub-genres within those. There seems to be a feeling like authors should stay in their own box and not write about anybody else, but the thing is, as a writer, you're constantly writing about things that you yourself haven't personally experienced. We should all be free to write about each other as human beings. Some gay men love reading lesbian novels, some straight women love gay male romance, and that richness of reaching across the boundaries helps us further our understanding of each other. — Patricia Nell Warren

Self-help books are making life downright unsafe. Women desperate to catch a man practice all the ploys recommended by these authors. Bump into him, trip over him, knock him down, spill something on him, scald him, but meet him. — Florence King

There is no man who is enterprising and keeps well up with the times but confesses that the women of to-day are in every respect, except political liberty, equal to the men. — S. Alice Callahan

A study in the Washington Post says that women have
better verbal skills than men. I just want to say to the
authors of that study: 'Duh. — Conan O'Brien

Even though Sam wasn't a romance author, he knew all the big ones, the heavy hitters and those that had crossed genres. He was greeted by most of the authors, some he knew and others who wanted to meet the famous author. Needless to say the romance genre remained comprised mostly by women authors. Sam stuck out like a rooster in a hen house. A tall, handsome, cool rooster in black jeans, his sunglasses hooked off the pocket of his pale blue oxford shirt. A rooster with a flock of hens following his every move. — Carolyn Gibbs

It is particularly distressing that so many recent books on love continue to insist that definitions of love are unnecessary and meaningless. Or worse, the authors suggest love should mean something different to men than it does to women - that the sexes should respect and adapt to our inability to communicate since we do not share the same language. This type of literature is popular because it does not demand a change in fixed ways of thinking about gender roles, culture or love. — Bell Hooks

Politicians are much like aging authors and older women. The dangerous phase in their lives is when they are no longer content with the respect of friends but demand the adulation of an audience. — Michael Dobbs

You can't exploit a woman who has based her entire career on exploiting herself. — Maggie Young

While men had the right to obey their biological urges, women had to suppress theirs until the perfect moment. From television, movies, books, magazines, my peers, and even some of my relatives, I was taught that if a woman allowed a man to penetrate her too soon, she was too easy of a conquest for him. He would move on to pursue greater challenges after he was finished using her body to relieve his sexual urges. If the woman waited too long to let the man enter her body, she was a prude and the man would eventually give up on her. Women needed to time this process perfectly so that she could "keep" a man in her life at all times.
It was the man's goal to catch the woman and the woman's goal to keep the man. — Maggie Young

Embrace your inner goddess, never let go of the light you carry within. — Cynthia Dougherty-Bernal

The window of her sadness was so vast that it almost opened a path to her soul. — Ondjaki

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

In much the same way, motherhood has become the essential female experience, valued above all others: giving life is where it's at. "Pro-maternity" propaganda has rarely been so extreme. They must be joking, the modern equivalent of the double constraint: "Have babies, it's wonderful, you'll feel more fulfilled and feminine than ever," but do it in a society in freefall in which waged work is a condition of social survival but guaranteed to no one, and especially not to women. Give birth in cities where accommodation is precarious, schools have surrendered the fight and children are subject to the most vicious mental assault through advertising, TV, internet, fizzy drink manufacturers and so on. Without children you will never be fulfilled as a woman, but bringing up kids in decent conditions is almost impossible. — Virginie Despentes

I think there are so many books out there written on relationships and romance that women are the authors of. How can women know exactly how men think? And there are so many guys out there with relationship books who are just not telling the truth. They have shaded parts. — Steve Harvey

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

How can you measure progress if you don't know what it costs and who has paid for it? How can the "market" put a price on things - food, clothes, electricity, running water - when it doesn't take into account the REAL cost of production? — Arundhati Roy

Drizzle happiness wherever you go. — A.D. Posey

The world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed, if men and women would be human beings instead of just business men, or plumbers, or army officers, or commuters, or educators, or authors, or clubwomen, or traveling salesmen, or Socialists, or Republicans, or Salvation Army leaders, or wearers of cloths. — Sinclair Lewis

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

Ebb and flow, ebb and flow, our lives. Is that why we're fascinated by the steadfastness of stars? The water reaches my calves. I begin the story of the Pleiades, women transformed into birds so Swift and bright that no man could snare them. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

As a child of the millennial generation, I was raised in a society in which we were under the misconception that women and men had reached equality. With the exception of very few matriarchal societies, women were more liberated than they had ever been in history. In America's middle class, basic education was practically handed to us. We have the ability to obtain a higher education and career without men. So it took me nearly a decade after becoming sexually active to realize that, as a woman, I was socially oppressed. I grew up in a world where a woman's abstinence until marriage was highly praised and if she must participate in premarital sex, to limit that activity to as few partners as possible. It was considered tacky to openly discuss my sexual encounters. I was also taught that, as a woman, I was hormonally programmed to be more emotional than men. If I had sex with a man, I was supposed to feel some sort of intimate attachment. If I didn't, I was a cruel-hearted slut. — Maggie Young

For every bad man and woman I have ever known, I have met ... an overwhelming number of thoroughly clean and decent people who still believe in God and cherish high ideals, and it is upon the lives of these people that I base what I write. To contend that this does not produce a picture true to life is idiocy. It does. It produces a picture true to ideal life; to the best that good men and good women can do at level best.
I care very little for the ... critics who proclaim that there is no such thing as a moral man, and that my pictures of life are sentimental and idealized. They are! And I glory in them! They are straight, living pictures from the lives of men and women of morals, honor, and loving kindness ...
Such a big majority of book critics and authors have begun to teach, whether they really believe it or not, that no book is true to life unless it is true to the worst in life. — Gene Stratton-Porter

This is a woman who didn't want her viewpoints challenged, nor to see the views of the half of the world that comprises men. Her assumption is that all male authors are sexist and that their books distort the views of women....that's bigoted and despicable: the form of feminism that sees men as the enemy from the outset, and seeks to reinforce that prejudice by reading only books that keep her in her safe space.....The future, in both life and books, is men and women together, with a mutual understanding that can come only from learning about each other's thoughts. [About Caitlin Moran's sexist statement that girls shouldn't read any books written by men.] — Jerry Coyne

This minimally invasive approach to hysteropexy involves laparoscopic plication of the round ligaments to the rectus sheath. A case series by O'Brien and Ibrahim (1994) of nine postmenopausal women with "moderate or marked" uterovaginal prolapse who underwent laparoscopic ventrosuspension provide discouraging results with 89% of women experiencing complete recurrence within 3 months, all of whom required additional surgery. Other authors have reported success with this procedure (Lin et al., 2005), although most literature focuses on uterosacral ligament plication and sacrohysteropexy, which are thought to provide more durable and anatomic repairs. — Mark D. Walters

I took one look at him, my mouth started watering and my panties moistened with thick fluid as if he had touched my sensation and made me instantaneously combust. — Siva D.

Men's memoirs are about answers; women's memoirs are about questions. Most male authors want to look good in their memoirs and have a place in posterity, while most women know that posterity is what happens when you no longer care. Women want to connect with others here and now; they couldn't care less about legacy! — Isabel Allende

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

We were pulling into the next station, when the woman suddenly got to her feet and made a move to squeeze past me. As her knees made contact with mine, she turned towards me. Her eyes locked straight onto mine, her eyelids pinned back, with a look I could only describe as sheer dread. In the next second, deep tram-lines formed between her eyebrows and her expression shifted. It was as if she was silently imploring me, entreating me. To do what? I had no idea. I was immobile, her gaze pressing me into my seat by some centrifugal force and I held her stare, unsure of how to react. Just as swiftly, she dropped her eyes and the moment passed. With one final glance behind her, she was swallowed up in the bodies at the door.
She was getting off. Something wasn't right. — A.J. Waines

Sand lines my soul which is filled with the breath of the ocean. — A.D. Posey

As a past president of the Writers Guild, I think women shouldn't write for free. Maybe you have to do it for a time, to make a reputation, but I think the idea of giving your work away is the beginning of authors not being able to make a living. — Erica Jong

Authors often say that their novels are like their children, and you want your novel, just like your children, to reflect well on you. When it goes out into the world, you hope that it will make you proud. But like a parent, an author must learn that her novel has needs of its own, and they are not the same as the author's.
Yes, you want your son's behavior toward women to reflect a loving relationship with his mother. However, if a woman is compelled to think about that relationship whenever they're in bed together, something has gone very very wrong. — Howard Mittelmark

Education for women is something that has plagued the world for a very long time. When I saw this problem firsthand, I knew I had to write about it. — Sahndra Fon Dufe

Lawyers aren't the most popular people, Miss Allen ... - Murder in Hand — Celia Conrad

Happiness is individualized. Don't box it in. Let it fly. — A.D. Posey

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

He told me he was used to getting what he wanted. — Celia Conrad

What are you grinning at?' Nal muttered. As if in response, the gull spread its wings and opened its shadow over the miniature ruins of the castle - too huge, Nal thought, and vaguely humanoid in shape - and then it flew off, laboring heavily against the wind. In the soft moonlight this created the disturbing illusion that the bird had hitched itself to Nal's shadow and was pulling his darkness from him. — Karen Russell

With a few sentences, the authors attempt to counteract the unscrupulous messages endemic to the title, content, and imagery of their book. This attempt fails, but speaks strongly to the character of our culture that even a book that earnestly wants to be about saving animals must resort to destroying women. — Kim Socha

Only mothers will ever know the true struggle and sacrifice it takes to create life. Authors come in at a close second. — R.P. Falconer

Would you like to come in?" I said. My hands were sweaty. Inside my chest an ocean heaved and crashed and heaved again.
"I would," he said. I saw his Adam's apple jerk as he swallowed. "Thank you."
I was distracted by that thank you. We had moved past the language of formality long ago. It was strange to relearn it with each other. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Women's studies needed a syllabus and so invented a canon overnight. It puffed up clunky, mundane contemporary women authors into Oz-like, skywriting dirigibles. Our best women students are being force-fed an appalling diet of cant, drivel and malarkey. — Camille Paglia

Even in their reading, More charged, too many women were prone to superficiality. In search of a passing knowledge of books and authors, many read anthologies of excerpted works, that selected the brightest passages but left out deeper contexts - eighteenth-century Reader's Digest were quite popular. More cautioned against a habit she viewed as cultivating a taste only for "delicious morsels," one that spits out "every thing which is plain." Good books, in contrast, require good readers: "In all well-written books, there is much that is good which is not dazzling; and these shallow critics should be taught, that it is for the embellishment of the more tame and uninteresting parts of his work, that the judicious poet commonly reserves those flowers, whose beauty is defaced when they are plucked from the garland into which he had so skillfully woven them. — Karen Swallow Prior

He without inspiration and motivation exists no more in a world full of innovations and inventions! — Darnaya Darice

I consider that women who are authors, lawyers, and politicians are monsters. — Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Patriarchy is women structuring lifelong decisions around men they haven't met. — Maggie Young

A Path Appears is an insightful book focused on how individuals can contribute to positive change and the remarkable people behind the organizations that make it happen. The authors' desire to motivate people to support good causes, learn about the situation in other countries, and find the best way to help their fellow men and women is inspiring. — Angelina Jolie

It doesn't have to be dreads. You can wear an Afro, or braids like you used to. There's a lot you can do with natural hair — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

At lunchtime and in the evening he read aloud to Cuneo while the latter prepared the meals. Cuneo would often request stories by women authors. "Women tell you more about the world. Men only tell you about themselves. — Nina George

Before novels written by women were relegated to their own 'genre,' I was introduced to Jane Smiley by a dear professor who raised my awareness of what female authors were bringing to the table of contemporary fiction. — Emma McLaughlin

The objective of stereotypes is not to reflect or represent a reality but to function as a disguise, or mystification, of objective social relations. — Hazel V. Carby

Peace is when we look upon the world together. — A.D. Posey

Then she says, You don't read women authors do ya? At least that's what I think I hear her say. Well, I said, how would you know and what would it matter anyway. Well, she says you just don't seem like you do. I said you're way wrong. She says which ones have you read then. I say I've read Erica Jong. — Bob Dylan

Female authors were still using male names when I was young, or they were neatly shoehorned into 'women's books' except for those few that men could always point at when the disparity was pointed out. — Sherwood Smith

Melissa Foster is a wonderful connector of readers and books, a friend of authors, and a tireless advocate for women. She is the real deal. — Jennie Shortridge

by allowance" and "loving with personal love." This distinction applies to books as well as to men and women; and in the case of the not very numerous authors who are the objects of the personal affection, it brings a curious consequence with it. There — Jane Austen

Even monarchs have need of authors, and fear their pens more than ugly women the painter's pencil. — Baltasar Gracian

Most people don't have real friends. You have people in your life waiting for opportunities to see what YOU can do for them. — Brandi L. Bates

In fiction, I searched for my favorite authors, women I have trusted to reassure me than not all teenage guys are total ditwads, that the archetype of the noble cute hero who devotes himself to the girl he loves has not gone the way of the rotary phone. That all I had to do was be myself (smart, hardworking, funny) and be patient and kind and he and I would find each other.
As Bea would say, this why they call it fiction. — Sarah Strohmeyer

You heard me cry long before I knew my voice. — A.D. Posey

They think the recipe for a 'home-maker' is- a woman who isn't smart enough, lacks skills and above all isn't ambitious enough! Well she is every bit as smart as the woman who puts on a suit to go to work in a man's world to prove- times have changed! She is every bit as intelligent! — Mrinalini Mitra

Entertainment must be a satisfying emotional experience, a stirring of the heart. We need all kinds of young men and women. Those people with an artist's eye and an executive's brain that we term directors. Those wrestlers with their souls and typewriters known as authors. The beggars on horseback called actors and actresses. — Hedda Hopper

Don't let western authors and evangelists fool you, Europeans were NOT killing witches; they were killing WOMEN. If the criminal act was allegedly that of sorcery/witchery, we would have seen similar accounts and charges against men to justify these narratives! They were indeed killing the WOMEN. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

I hear you in the morning sun. — A.D. Posey

Muslim women, and critics, male and female, of Western models of sex and sexuality, are silenced. The price of speech for a Muslim woman in the West is the disavowal of Islam. Books condemning Islam are picked by publishers and featured on talk shows. Their authors are commended for their courage. Speech in defense of Islam is read as the speech of subjection. Islam oppresses women. Any woman speaking in its favor must be deluded or forced to speak against her will. If she defends the hijab or speaks in defense of polygamy, she cannot be believed. No woman in her right mind could defend these. Any woman who does must be deluded or coerced. The more Muslim women object to Western efforts to "help" them, the more need there is to liberate them. — Anne Norton

Ancient philosophy was framed by prodigies,
Aristotle, Plato and Socrates.
And even though their thoughts were deemed the aristocratic voice,
they also had a thing for little boys.

Katherine the Great so it's been said,
needed large animals to be fulfilled in bed.
From historic rulers to the Ancient Greeks,
we're standing on the shoulders of freaks.

Isn't life pretty? Earnest Hemingway once said,
then he a bullet through his head.
Salvador Dali's surreal paintings were God sent,
you'd never know he ate his own excrement.

Then there's Da Vinci for whom it required,
dressing in women's underwear to be inspired.
From the great romantics to the Ancient Greeks,
we're standing on the shoulders of freaks.

Truman Capote needless to say,
would be intoxicated 20 hours a day.
From the modern authors to the Ancient Greeks,
we're standing on the shoulders of freaks. — Henry Phillips

Such a big majority of book critics and authors have begun to teach, whether they really believe it or not, that no book is TRUE TO LIFE unless it is true to the WORST IN LIFE, that the idea has infected even the women. — Gene Stratton-Porter

Precious few of us stop to think about what we're feeling. — Deborah Sandella

Women excel more in literary judgment than in literary production,
they are better critics than authors. — Marguerite Gardiner, Countess Of Blessington

The 1947 best-seller Modern Woman: The Lost Sex urged that spinsters be barred from teaching children on the grounds of "emotional incompetence." It was the ultimate example of the pendulum swinging - instead of prohibiting the employment of married women as teachers, society now wanted marriage to be mandatory. "A great many children have unquestionably been damaged psychologically by the spinster teacher who cannot be an adequate model of a complete woman either for boys or girls," the authors argued. — Gail Collins