Top 100 Quotes About Women Writers
#1. Male critics and men in the publishing industry want from their women writers what they want from their wives. I'm interested in presenting characters that are more challenging, threatening, complicated and unpredictable.
Kate Braverman
#2. But sometimes the women writers will pitch something and I'll hear it, but the men will keep talking.
Wanda Sykes
#3. I'm really aware that in fiction, women are pretty much equal. There's a lot of very successful women novelists. Not so much [for women writers working] in film.
Emma Donoghue
#4. What we need is more women writers, writing for older women. There are some actresses who have production companies and create their own material, and I truly admire that.
Kathleen Turner
#5. I want women writers to write boldly, wildly, deeply. I want them to feel really liberated to tell the brutal truth, however they see that truth and are moved to tell it.
Julianna Baggott
#6. Women writers lift themselves up from the depths; as they rise, each brings with her what she is able to carry.
Lucy Poate Stebbins
#7. Women writers make for rewarding (and efficient) lovers. They are clever liars to fathers and husbands; yet they never hold their tongues too long, nor keep ardent typing fingers still.
Roman Payne
#8. The 1970s were so wonderful for women writers. There were all these women, and they were seen as doing the most interesting, innovative and exciting stuff in science fiction. I was inspired by that.
Lisa Tuttle
#9. There is not much future in men being friends with great women although it can be pleasant enough before it gets better or worse, and there is usually even less future with truly ambitious women writers.
Ernest Hemingway,
#10. Women writers specifically ... are the ultimate outsiders.
Janet Fitch
#11. Women writers should write a lot if they want to write. Take the English women, for example. What amazing workers.
Anton Chekhov
#12. One of those largish US women writers on the metaphysics of shagging had declared, as if it were a revelation - and a terrible one - that the sex act inevitably entailed violence on the female. Well, of course it did, you well-meaning, trite, benighted duck.
Bill James
#13. Sitting down with younger women writers and saying, "This is what I do and you can do this" is hugely important.
Sarah Ruhl
#14. As a dedicated, successful writer, Lydia Sigourney violated essential elements of the very gender roles she celebrated. In the process, she offered young, aspiring women writers around the country an example of the possibilities of achieving both fame and economic reward.
Lydia Sigourney
#15. There were all us baby boomers who had a grammar school education, started to learn, then went on the pill, the whole thing, and so there are today a lot more women writers, editors, producers, and so a lot more women's stories. God, the BBC's practically run by women.
Julie Walters
#16. Like other women writers of my class, I am expected to tame my talent to suit the comfort of my family.
Kamala Suraiyya Das
#17. Some of the 'New Women' writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the 'New Woman' won't condescend in future to accept. She will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it too!
Bram Stoker
#18. I've noticed over the past years of my writerly life that women writers in particular are discouraged in cleverly disguised forms from including the intellectual in their creative material way more than you would believe.
Lidia Yuknavitch
#19. We don't want to create a literary ghetto in which black writers are only allowed to write black characters and women writers are put on 'girl books.'
G. Willow Wilson
#20. Women writers of all people should know better than to pigeonhole women, put them in little groups, the smart one, the sweet one.
Anna Quindlen
#21. While there are 'women writers' there are not, and have never been, 'men writers.' This is an empty category, a class without specimens; for the noun 'writer' - the very verb 'writing' - always implies masculinity.
Joyce Carol Oates
#22. I think it's a question which particularly arises over women writers: whether it's better to have a happy life or a good supply of tragic plots.
Wendy Cope
#23. There are a lot of wonderful women writers who would be good influences on writers. You've got to spread yourself out and educate yourself with all kinds of stories.
Ray Bradbury
#24. When I was in graduate school, I had a teacher who said to me, 'Women writers should marry somebody who thinks writing is cute. Because if they really realised what writing was, they would run a mile.'
Lorrie Moore
#25. Someday hopefully it won't be necessary to allocate a special evening to celebrate where we are and how far we've come ... someday women writers, producers and crew members will be so commonplace, and roles and salaries for actresses will outstrip those for men, and pigs will fly.
Sigourney Weaver
#26. Women writers have been told, forever, that our stories were not valuable. Not as valuable as men's stories about wars, business, power.
Joyce Maynard
#27. In my experience, and that of a lot of other women writers, all of the questions coming at them from interviewers tend to be about how lucky they are to be where they are - about luck and identity and how the idea struck them.
Eleanor Catton
#28. What a revolting contrast exists in England between the slavery of women and the intellectual superiority of women writers.
Flora Tristan
#29. Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa.
Peter Straub
#30. I find myself coming out of the library with all women writers. I keep hoping the library attendant won't notice, but when 8 out of 8 of the books you take out are by women, you try not to look too dykey.
Eve Babitz
#31. Most women writers don't interest me because they're hung up with being a woman, they're hung up with being Jewish, they're hung up with being somebody or other. Rather than just going, just spurting, just creating.
Patti Smith
#32. I've been trying to find women writers for my staff for a while now and I have three women on my staff and three guys so it's pretty equal. I don't know why that is. It's been the same thing for a while. It's hard for female comedians to stand out. That's weird. That's a shame.
Ellen DeGeneres
#33. Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.
Virginia Woolf
#34. Black skin was filled with so many barriers, so many restrictions, so many.
Randi Pink
#35. I like my whiskey neat and strong just as I like my women. Women who have matured in their minds and bodies; women who have faced the storms of life!
Because my life has always been about the thrill with the raging storms!
Avijeet Das
#36. I have a well-balanced show. It's 50/50 on men/women, and also African-American/white writers, it's the same thing. I have four African-American writers, and four non-African-American writers.
Wanda Sykes
#37. Some people desire to be famous. I probably wouldn't be very good at it.
Sarah Warman
#38. Fancourt can't write women,' said Nina dismissively. 'He tries but he can't do it. His women are all temper, tits and tampons.
Robert Galbraith
#39. Legislators, priests, philosophers, writers, ans scientists have striven to show that the subordinate position of woman is willed in heaven and advantageous on earth.
Simone De Beauvoir
#40. I don't have to work extra hard, but that's because there are a lot of women in my professional network and I have hired a lot of women as full-time writers and part-time columnists.
Ann Friedman
#41. I think women are in much the same place in the Irish theater as they are everywhere else. Certainly, we have wonderful Irish writers, and we have quite a number of Irish women directors. But there could be more, and there should be more.
Garry Hynes
#42. Before there were books, we read each other.
Lisa Cron
#43. I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me.
Jeanette Winterson
#44. Male writers are thought of as "writers" first and then "men". As for female writers, they are first "feamle" and only then "writers".
Elif Shafak
#45. Love is alive when there's music in your heart.
A.D. Posey
#46. I never could understand why some writers treat women as helpless. Every woman I know is strong in her own unique way.
Terry Goodkind
#47. When I was starting out, the first women studio heads and writers were just getting into their perches - development execs learning their chops.
Lynda Obst
#48. I was always aware that Jack loved women not only for their bodies but for the stories that came into being as they interacted with him
they were part of his "road," the infinite range of experience that always had to remain open to fuel his work.
Joyce Johnson
#49. Anytime there's a bad female stand-up somewhere, some dickhead Interblogger will deduce that "women aren't funny." Using that same math, I can state: Male comedy writers piss in cups.
Tina Fey
#50. Books inspire a man to embrace the world or flee it. They start wars and end them. They make the men and women who write and publish them vast fortunes, and nearly as quickly can drive them into madness and despair. Stay away from what you do not fathom from now on ...
Matthew Pearl
#51. Writers and readers are still trying to work out unresolved problems between men and women, and that is why millions of women around the world are hooked on romantic fiction. So am I.
Charlotte Lamb
#52. You heard me cry long before I knew my voice.
A.D. Posey
#53. Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.
Virginia Woolf
#54. There aren't enough good roles for strong women. I wish we had more female writers. Most of the female characters you see in films today are the 'poor heartbroken girl.'
Gal Gadot
#55. I've never felt grounded because of my ancestry or my gender. I think until women get away from that they're not going to be great writers.
Patti Smith
#56. They say great themes make great novels.. but what these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women.
John O'Hara
#57. Yes the sex scenes are explicit but we all love the dirty bits!
Airam
#58. James Patterson has a way with female characters. He understands women in a way that a lot of male writers don't.
Tracy Pollan
#59. I do feel it's crucial that women's opinions be taken equally with men's. But still'I have not been accepted by the American white feminist writers and activists, and frankly I don't care to be, so I am a womanist. I am feisty and I am given to womanish behavior.
Kola Boof
#60. It's also interesting to notice that most of the best Finnish speculative writers are women.
Toni Jerrman
#61. Stories not only give us a much needed practice on figuring out what makes people tick, they give us insight into how we tick.
Lisa Cron
#62. I once wrote a book on women in science. I realized when I was interviewing them that they were the equivalent of writers, or anyone else who tries to make art out of life. Through science they had reached the expressive.
Vivian Gornick
#63. I think a lot of studios today are run by women, and we are entering a time when a lot of women have evolved in Second City and Upright Citizens Brigade and wanted to become writers and comedians.
Judd Apatow
#64. I think I have a pretty goofy profile for a writer. It seems to me most writers were reading 'Little Women' when they were 6 months old. At the age of a lot of my readers, I wanted to be a major league baseball player. I didn't read much.
Jerry Spinelli
#65. One of the common themes you will read in interview after interview is the call to keep fighting for your vision. This is a message to women directors, producers, writers - anyone who wants to work in the business. Your voice counts. Your vision matters.
Melissa Silverstein
#66. Writing is a kind of revenge against circumstance too: bad luck, loss, pain. If you make something out of it, then you've no longer been bested by these events.
Louise Gluck
#67. In matters of good-lookingness, we writers are the ugliest of the bunch, and normally our appearance is akin to that of someone investigating a crime scene; though the women in American writing keep producing world-class beauty in droves, and there are many breathtaking writers among them.
Pat Conroy
#68. Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland, there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit and talent ... Yet, in a curious way, there is not much difference between the product of a good writer and a bad one. They both have to toe the same mark.
Ben Hecht
#69. I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.
Paul Auster
#70. They were from different generations, culture, nations. But even these things did not divide them so much as their separate conceptions of what it meant to be a woman.
Patricia Duncker
#71. If I ask you to think about something, you can decide not to. But if I make you feel something? Now I have your attention.
Lisa Cron
#72. Newsweek never hired women as writers and only one or two female staffers were promoted to that rank no matter how talented they were ... Any aspiring journalist who was interviewed for a job was told, If you want to be a writer, go somewhere else
women don't write at Newsweek.
Lynn Povich
#73. Happiness is individualized. Don't box it in. Let it fly.
A.D. Posey
#75. I find women as writers and as characters are operating within narrow confines. They inherit a kind of ghetto of the soul. I'm trying to enlarge the spectrum.
Kate Braverman
#76. As a writer who happens to be a woman, I am constantly devalued - even by other writers who happen to be women - simply because of a marketing decision. Am I truly less talented, less audacious, less erudite, less brave than my more quote-unquote literary colleagues?
Jillian Medoff
#77. The facts of religion were convincing only to those who were already convinced.
Simone De Beauvoir
#78. What is interesting to me is looking at how male and female writers depict men who, come in behind to fill those domestic duties, deal with personal and cultural lack of respect for doing what is lingeringly perceived as 'women's work.'
Sherwood Smith
#79. 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
#80. Women occupy, in great masses, the 'household tasks' of industry. They are nurses but not doctors, secretaries but not executives, researchers but not writers, workers but not managers, bookkeepers but not promoters.
Vivian Gornick
#81. Peace is when we look upon the world together.
A.D. Posey
#82. I'm not sure many writers are trying to reconcile all the things that are separated in our culture - body and mind, urban and pastoral, lyricism and hardboiled, men and women, joy and grief. I tried to do quite a lot, but I wanted to create a serious work of literature.
Nicola Griffith
#83. A man does not become a real man by showing his physical domination over women. A man becomes a real man by loving, respecting and protecting women.
Avijeet Das
#84. All serious writers want the obvious rewards: fame, money, women, love
and most of all, an audience!
Edward Abbey
#85. My female writers have always been my backbone. I had a writing room of six women for five years so I know what women do. Cultivated by me, by the way!
Michael Patrick King
#86. An awful lot of thriller writers write women rather badly. So just doing it OK gets a lot of credit.
Ken Follett
#87. Reviewing books is all about coziness. It is all of it a kind of caucus race. Women review women, Jewish writers review and praise Jewish writers, blacks review blacks, etc.
Alexander Theroux
#88. I used to forget that I was an Indian woman. I would even forget that I was a woman. I don't think of myself as bringing to the table a lot of 'women's issues.' I don't feel the need to write about maternity. I grew up thinking that the talented people in comedy were hard-joke writers.
Mindy Kaling
#89. Anna is the sort of woman who writers write about, Tom. Somewhere in the third act, women like her save characters like you and me from ourselves. She's the loveliest literary device in the world.
Matthew Norman
#90. Men like women who write, even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.
Marguerite Duras
#91. I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.
Jorge Luis Borges
#92. Drizzle happiness wherever you go.
A.D. Posey
#95. If a writer starts worring about what he or she has left out or forgotten, they might not be able to write even a single line.
Baby Halder
#96. Most historians and other writers of what we now consider 'primary sources' simply didn't think about women and their contribution to society. They took it for granted, except when that contribution or its lack directly affected men.
Tansy Rayner Roberts
#97. I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.
Jane Austen
#99. On Memorial Day, I don't want to only remember the combatants. There were also those who came out of the trenches as writers and poets, who started preaching peace, men and women who have made this world a kinder place to live.
Eric Burdon
#100. For together with those who themselves being normal, had long put intellects above bodies, were writers, painters, musicians and scholars, men and women who, set apart from their birth, had determined to hack out a niche in existence.
Radclyffe Hall
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