Woman Writer Quotes

#1. Was it an insult to be called a "woman writer"? Didn't it have a taint of, say, the "woman driver"?

Mary Norris

#2. I'm a fiction writer, and I do write essays, but I am not a poet. And I absolutely reject the phrase 'woman writer' as anti-feminist. I wrote an essay about this as far back as 1977, at the height of the neo-feminist movement.

Cynthia Ozick

#3. If you're a woman writer, sometime, somewhere, you will be asked: Do you think of yourself as a writer first, or as a woman first? Look out. Whoever asks this hates and fears both writing and women.

Margaret Atwood

#4. No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much" ... No woman has ever written enough.

Bell Hooks

#5. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

Virginia Woolf

#6. Of the paperbacks that you see at the airport, I am the most violent woman writer.

Chelsea Cain

#7. People often ask how I can reject the phrase 'woman writer' and not reject the phrase 'Jewish writer' - a preposterous question. 'Jewish' is a category of civilization, culture, and intellect, and 'woman' is a category of anatomy and physiology.

Cynthia Ozick

#8. Everyone thinks I have a coffee plantation in Sierra Leone, but I have a cashew crop project. I wrote about a woman who owns a coffee plantation! When you are talking about a woman writer coming from a hot country, there's a complete assumption that she is writing about her own life.

Aminatta Forna

#9. It's very hard to be an experimental woman writer. If I had been writing under a pseudonym, just initials, I might have a different reputation - but, then I couldn't be myself either.

Joyce Carol Oates

#10. A woman writer, quitting love before literature when love lets her down, will put literature before love.

Doris Lessing

#11. I would be ecstatic if the very first writer to step foot in a Storyknife cabin was an Alaska Native woman writer.

Dana Stabenow

#12. Being a woman writer, I would be deceiving myself if I said I write completely through the eye of a man. There's nothing bad in it, but that does not make me a feminist writer. I hate that name. The tag is from the Western world - like we are called the Third World.

Buchi Emecheta

#13. Of course, if I write a first-person novel about a woman writer, I am inviting every book reviewer to apply the autobiographical label
to conclude that I am writing about myself. But one must never not write a certain kind of novel out of fear of what the reaction to it will be.

John Irving

#14. I first thought about becoming a writer after the age of 30, which is rather late, I'd say. In my 20s, I wasn't especially good at anything, and I didn't have a lot of experiences. I was just a young woman without a good job.

Natsuo Kirino

#15. I never thought of myself as either a woman or a man. I thought of myself as a person who was born to a writer, who was doomed to be a writer.

Marguerite Young

#16. But I've discovered being a writer is an ongoing apprenticeship, just like everything else in life that matters to me-being a mother, a wife, a daughter, or simply a woman alive in the world, content to be myself. Today at thirty-two, I am glad to wake up each day and begin.

Sue Monk Kidd

#17. One of the brightest lights of our time-a brilliant writer, a fierce friend, and a truly phenomenal woman.

Barack Obama

#18. As a writer and a mom, I wish I could split into two or three different people so I could be with my kids all day, write all day, and go out and do the interviews all day. Multiplicity woman!

G. Willow Wilson

#19. A great writer is a great writer ... Tolstoy was not a woman, but 'Anna Karenina' is still a pretty good book.

Phil Klay

#20. There was a French activist and writer, Simone de Beauvoir, who said, 'You are not born woman. You become one' ... Words I live by.

Bruce Jenner

#21. Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?
It took me years to write, will you take a look?

Nancy Lynn Jarvis

#22. When he describes woman, each writer discloses his general ethics and the special idea he has of himself; and in her he often betrays also the gap between his world view and his egotistical dreams.

Simone De Beauvoir

#23. Alas, two men are often necessary to provide a woman with a perfect lover, just as in literature a writer composes a type only by employing the singularities of several similar characters.

Honore De Balzac

#24. I was a woman and did not yet think of myself as a writer. I was a mapmaker.

Shay Youngblood

#25. Another writer argued in an 1895 issue of the Cosmopolitan that by riding a bicycle, a woman would "become mistress of herself," transformed into a "rational, useful being restored to health and sanity.

Frances E. Willard

#26. Now I will be anything else you please, except dull. You may say I have been dull already? As I am an honest woman, I don't agree with you. There are some people who bring dull minds to their reading - and them blame the writer for it. I say no more.

Wilkie Collins

#27. For every man there was an inferior woman, for every writer there was a checker," said Nora Ephron. "they were the artists and we were the drones.

Lynn Povich

#28. A writer should be of as great probity and honesty as a priest of God. He is either honest or not, as a woman is either chaste or not, and after one piece of dishonest writing he is never the same again.

Ernest Hemingway,

#29. When I did the first 'Matrix,' after it came out, I had a woman come up to me and just thank me for Trinity because she was an action writer. She said she was getting really good opportunities now.

Carrie-Anne Moss

#30. But the fact is, I'm not work-identified. I'm not a lawyer or a writer. I'm a mom, and I'm a woman, and that's the kind of people I want to see in books in the starring role.

Lisa Scottoline

#31. I don't categorize myself as an 85-year-old woman who has written an erotic novel. I categorize myself as a writer who's written an erotic novel.

Gloria Vanderbilt

#32. Listen: I don't have anything against autobiographies, so long as the writer has a penis that's twelve inches long when erect. So long as the writer is a woman who was once a whore and is moderately wealthy in her old age.

Roberto Bolano

#33. It never occurs to her that she will not be a writer and only occasionally does it occur to her, depressingly, that she is going to grow into a woman, not a man.

Jean Stafford

#34. If he can write a book at all, a writer cannot do it by peeping over his shoulder at somebody else, any more than a woman can have a baby by watching some other woman have one. It is a genital process, and all of its stages are intra-abdominal;

James M. Cain

#35. Ronan woke up the following morning with a terrible hangover and a huge sense of regret. He had hurt the woman he loves most in the world and he knew Katie was very strong willed and didn't forgive easily.

Annette J. Dunlea

#36. In 1925 Woolf began an affair with Sackville-West, who was married to Harold Nicolson, the diplomat and writer, and the development of their close relationship, which does not seem to have undermined either woman's marriage, coincided with Woolf 's most productive years as a writer.

Jane Goldman

#37. When trying to seduce a woman, a writer says: 'I'm a writer', and scribbles a poem on a napkin. It always works.

Paulo Coelho

#38. All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.

Saul Bellow

#39. Being a writer is something I love to do, plus I get independence. It's a great job for a woman because she can work at home and always be there for the children.

Anne Mather

#40. Being a writer brings out a sassy woman inside me, and I love her so.

Anna Bayes

#41. The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony.

John Cheever

#42. How it's Done is a richly woven tale of a young woman who discovers what it really means to be an adult. This story, told with honesty and heart, held me in my seat to the very end. I have discovered a new favorite writer in Christine MacLean.

Han Nolan

#43. I don't live my life as a writer. I'm a mother, an African-American woman, and I do everything that everybody else does - cook and a little bit of cleaning.

Terry McMillan

#44. Really, I am entirely material driven. If a project appeals to me, I will try to find the right writer and director. And that may be someone I've worked with before, or it may not. It may be a woman, or it may not.

Alison Owen

#45. SURE-FIRE SINGLES AD:
Famous Writer needs woman to organize his life and spend his money. Loves to turn off Sunday football and go to the Botanical Gardens with that special someone. Will obtain plastic surgery if necessary.

Joe Bob Briggs

#46. I am a super-confident writer, and as a joke writer and as an actress, I'm like, 'I want to go head-to-head with every person.' I am an Indian woman and I'm a kind of double minority in this world.

Mindy Kaling

#47. Heather resented it that this woman was his daughter. How does a writer of the most subtle, serious fiction end up with a daughter who watches Oprah? I'd be a better daughter for him than she is.

Brian Morton

#48. With 'Suffragette,' I felt that a female writer would be good, and considering the subject matter, who would be better to write the script than Abi Morgan? She was the first choice, and she happens to be a woman.

Alison Owen

#49. That old man over there
Is selling trinkets made of stones
That old woman the entire world
In a map without any hole!

Avijeet Das

#50. A perfect writer would make words sing, dance, kiss, do the male and female act, bear children, weep, bleed, rage, stab, steal, fire cannon, steer ships, sack cities, charge with cavalry or infantry, or do anything that man or woman or the natural powers can do.

Walt Whitman

#51. As writer Elisabeth Elliot phrased it, The fact that I am a woman does not make me a different kind of Christian, but the fact that I am a Christian does make me a different kind of woman.

Liz Curtis Higgs

#52. I'm a writer first and a woman after.

Katherine Mansfield

#53. I also have a role model back in New Zealand, a woman called Miranda Harcourt. She's an actress and a writer. Her willingness to stay open to material is really great. I read a lot, and I try to watch and listen to diverse material.

Rose McIver

#54. I'm not the type of woman who shows off my body; I'm a vocalist and I'm a writer and I think people see that more so than they see anything else. That's just who I am.

Jazmine Sullivan

#55. I really believe that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. I think highly of faithfulness. But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman

Anais Nin

#56. As a writer, if someone falls in love with my work, I know they have fallen in love with my mind. Having no idea what my face looks like, they chose my mind. Art may be the only place a woman can be whole without being seen.

Nayyirah Waheed

#57. To be a woman and a writer is double mischief, for the world will slight her who slights "the servile house," and who would rather make odes than beds.

Dilys Laing

#58. Good. Coffee is good for you. It's the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave.

Ernest Hemingway,

#59. Today it's almost impossible to do it unless you are an actress or writer with power ... I wouldn't hesitate right this minute to hire a talented woman if the subject matter were right.

Ida Lupino

#60. It's not hard to be a woman in comedy as long as you're also a writer. You have to create your opportunity.

Kristen Schaal

#61. The planet is populated by human beings, of which there are only two sexes, and the role of the writer is to explore otherness, other realities. So the idea of a man exploring what it's like to be a woman doesn't strike me as being that wild or crazy an idea.

Yann Martel

#62. As a middle-aged woman who has had some luck as a writer, I'd like this profession of author to remain a possibility for young writers in the future - and not become an arena solely for the hobbyist or the well-heeled.

Janet Fitch

#63. Not uncommonly one hears some romantic young woman say, 'Oh, I would give anything to be a writer.' But she would not; and 'anything' is not enough. One must give everything.

Isabel Paterson

#64. When a young woman tells me that she wants to become and actor, I say, 'No, be a writer. Or go to business school and learn how to run a studio.' The only real change will come from behind the scenes.

Halle Berry

#65. How difficult it was for a woman, once she was named by doctors, to become a writer, because many aspects of her behavior that are accepted in the genius or creative man are regarded as dangerous in the woman.

Kate Zambreno

#66. A literary agent is nothing but a cheap salesman (or woman); while a writer is a cheap salesman (or woman) who also has to actually write the books.

John Hodgman

#67. I'm not a writer. I marvel at writing. I am sometimes absolutely astounded when I read something and I think how in the world did that man or that woman sit down at a typewriter, a computer or a pen and an ink well, and seemingly have nothing come between their heart and that pen.

Kevin Spacey

#68. Among all the 'awards' that I have hitherto collected, I consider the title of 'patita' or 'fallen woman' to be the highest. This is an achievement of my long-struggling life as a writer and as a woman.

Taslima Nasrin

#69. Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, a good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-dressed, well-groomed, and unaggressive.

Marya Mannes

#70. I am the woman with the cool vintage glasses ... I am the proud wife beside her husband ... I am the writer who has written a new novel.

Ann Hood

#71. Vita Sackville-West is one of my favorite female icons. She was a writer and a prolific gardener, but she also had a relationship with Virginia Woolf, and she was married to Sir Harold Nicolson. She was a woman who lived outside of norms.

Gwendoline Christie

#72. The Ordinary is Extraordinary ..." my motto for life as a writer/Mom/woman

Lisa Barr

#73. I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.

Dorothy Allison

#74. I may not be able to say these words to you but that doesn't mean I can't say it to the rest of the world. I'm not a poet. Nor do I try to be one. I simply share what I do in my spare time. All poetry springs from genuine feelings. I'm only a woman expressing herself to the world.

Tammy-Louise Wilkins

#75. Because books saved my life, literally, I've become close to them

Malebo Sephodi

#76. I am deeply in tune with my heart and core, and it's made me a better writer, artist, and most of all woman. It's made me more myself.

Lykke Li

#77. The career of a writer is comparable to that of a woman of easy virtue. You write first for pleasure, later for the pleasure of others and finally for money.

Marcel Achard

#78. A writer in early 1930, boosting the beauty business, started off a magazine article with the sentence: The average American woman has sixteen square feet of skin.

Howard Zinn

#79. Advice from a Romance Writer: Guys, make your woman feel pretty even on an 'off' day. Trust me, good things will come of it.

Michelle M. Pillow

#80. From fried witchetty grubs to gold-plated turnips, when you're a writer you never know what's going to appear on your plate next. It keeps a woman alert, it does.

Lois McMaster Bujold

#81. Have you been writing any personal experience articles lately?" the woman asked the writer. "No," replied the writer. "I've been busy having them.

Ruth Peterman

#82. Sometimes she narrates her actions inside her head in third-person. Does that make her a writer or a woman?

Kate Zambreno

#83. The novelist is more like a pregnant woman who delivers her own child unaided. A messy procedure, with lots of groaning.

David Mitchell

#84. We made much less happy by the kindness of a great writer, which strictly speaking we find only in his books, than we suffer from the hostility of a woman whom we have not chosen for her intelligence, but whom we cannot stop ourselves from loving.

Marcel Proust

#85. 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