Top 91 Women S Writing Quotes
#1. It was actually a women's writing group I belonged to in graduate school that gave me the courage to move from poetry to fiction.
Mary Gordon
#2. A book is not an example of 'women's writing' simply because it is written by a woman. Writing may become 'women's writing' when it could not have been written by a man.
Rachel Cusk
#3. Nu shu means women's writing. And it was a secret writing system that was invented by women, used by women and kept a secret by women in one very remote county in China for a thousand years. It's the only language that was invented and used by women to have been found anywhere in the world.
Lisa See
#4. I think that literature quite often emerges from areas where there has been a lack of articulation, like women's writing.
Edna Longley
#5. It seems to me that 'women's writing' by nature would not seek equivalence in the male world. It would be a writing that sought to express a distinction, not deny it.
Rachel Cusk
#6. There is still the feeling that women's writing is a lesser class of writing, that what goes on in the nursery or the bedroom is not as important as what goes on in the battlefield, that what women know about is a less category of knowledge.
Erica Jong
#7. I think women have such rich emotional lives that they are expressive about. I also think they're funny. I like watching strong female characters, and I like writing them. I don't know if it's conscious that I gravitate towards women, but it's certainly evolved that way.
Darren Star
#8. Writers (my kind of writers: aspiring novelists, ruminative thinkers, people whose brains don't work quick enough to blog or link or tweet, basically old, stubborn blowhards) were through. We were like women's hat makers or buggy-whip manufacturers: Our time was done.
Gillian Flynn
#9. In moments of exhaustion, I think for some reason of writing an autobiography
proper work for tired artists
but every autobiographer must secretly believe he has triumphed in life. Maybe, incidentally, this accounts for the paucity of women's autobiographies
they know better.
Arthur Miller
#10. What I'm doing is writing stories about women who care about justice. They are women who think about the difference between right and wrong, what's legal and illegal, ethical and unethical, moral and immoral.
Lisa Scottoline
#11. My highest point was the first thing I won, a short story competition in a women's magazine in the Eighties. It was the first time I'd had my writing validated, and the first thing I'd ever shown anyone else.
Kate Atkinson
#12. Writing about women's sexuality is very scary for me because I'm always afraid I'll get it wrong.
Dan Chaon
#13. I don't care whether they're men or women, that's bullshit. A good writer can get into any gender, can get into any mouth. When I write I may be a Brando creep, or a girl laying on the floor, or a Japanese tourist, or a slob like Richard Speck. You have to be a chameleon when you're writing.
Patti Smith
#14. I write about African women, that's really my topic. I have no shame or qualm in it because it's a very underrepresented topic, which is part of the reason I started to write.
Danai Gurira
#15. I like writing strong women, because as a straight male, there's nothing more attractive to me than a strong girl.
Jay Baruchel
#16. Men aren't actively writing women to oppress them, men are writing what they know. I say you can be much better as a woman for women's rights if you just go up there and write your own material.
Rachel Bloom
#17. The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.
Grace Paley
#18. "War gives men a plain-and-simple something to do ... Women write diaries in the hope that their words will beckon fate." It's a romantic manifesto.
James Ellroy
#19. It's often women who are writing leading roles for women. Most of the stuff that comes my way is not actually about women. I'm just asked to be a supporting player in a story about a man, and I, frankly, was not interested in doing that.
Carrie Coon
#20. Most women would say they relate to 'Hedda Gabler' - there's a part of her in them. Ibsen was writing about a deep ambivalence that many women feel about domesticity. I think about myself and friends of mine - we have some of Hedda's qualities and traits.
Annette Bening
#21. Women's magazines continue to print 'helpful' articles on How to Hang on to Your Husband while thousands of wives write to me and complain that 'hanging is too good for 'em.
Ann Landers
#22. A lot of guys get slammed pretty hard. I do think there's a tendency with women performers to just sort of write them off. The "Flavor of the Month" kind of thing. Or as a novelty, because I do think women in bands are still considered a novelty, or a little confection.
Nina Gordon
#23. When women are seen with pen in hand, they are met immediately with shrieks commanding a return to that life of pain which their writing had interrupted, a life devoted to the women's work of needle and distaff.
Arcangela Tarabotti
#24. A wise woman has already a rite
Where she knows right from left.
She usually writes when she's right
And always leaves before she's left.
Ana Claudia Antunes
#25. I hate it when people don't recognize the work of women as being universal, or having any import to the world at large, as opposed to men's work, which is generally tends to be seen as more universal - men's writing about their own experience tends to be put in a broader context.
Ani DiFranco
#26. I'm not really caught up with celebrity women. I think a regular girl that goes to school or works at a Complex or Spin or Blender or whatever, one of those magazines. She'd probably be flyer to me than the person she's writing about.
Wale
#27. People have been writing premature obituaries on the women's movement since its beginning.
Ellen Goodman
#28. I loved 1930's women's pictures'films by Josef Von Sternberg or William Wyler. So, I fashioned a style out of that. The integrity and ethos of what I would write, however, came from the films of Ousmane Sembene and from reading Richard Wright, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath and Alice Walker.
Kola Boof
#29. I was a woman writing at the early moment when small drops of worried resentment and noble rage were secretly, slowly building into the second wave of the women's movement. I didn't know my small-drop presence or usefulness in this accumulation.
Grace Paley
#30. Wherever you find 'men together' - writing the rules, as at exclusive golf or other men's clubs, businesses, and lodges where they wear elaborate robes and funny hats - women are kept completely outside if possible and, when grudgingly admitted, to highly restricted areas or token status.
Eugene Kennedy
#31. Just when you think there's nothing to write about, Nixon says, 'I am not a crook.' Jimmy Carter says, 'I have lusted after women in my heart.' President Reagan says, 'I have just taken a urinalysis test, and I am not on dope.
Art Buchwald
#32. Women's liberation by women who are already liberated through channels that would mess them up further
Nikhil Sharda
#33. The one thing about being a dude and writing from a female perspective is that the baseline is, you suck. The baseline is it takes so long for you to work those atrophied muscles - for you to get on parity with what women's representations of men are.
Junot Diaz
#34. A world that does not love, respect and protect its Women is doomed to perish! Because Women are Mother Earth!
Avijeet Das
#35. Woman, especially her sexuality, provides the object of endless commentary , description, supposition. But the result of all the telling only deepens the enigma and makes woman's erotic force something that male storytelling can never quite explain or contain.
Peter Brooks
#36. Women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time ... Women, then, have not had a dog's chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one's own.
Virginia Woolf
#37. I believe it's incredibly important to write against [racial] stereotypes. If we give in and make sure that all black women characters are asexual, gentle, and kind we wind up with another set of stereotypes.
Justine Larbalestier
#38. In writing, a good guy must never break any of the Ten Commandments. A bad guy must break every one. That's why writing female characters is so much fun. They're not GUYS at all.
Kimberly Black
#39. I had learned a little about writing from Soldier's Pay - how to approach language, words: not with seriousness so much as an essayist does, but with a kind of alert respect, as you approach dynamite; even with joy, as you approach women: perhaps with the same secretly unscrupulous intentions.
William Faulkner
#40. I'm the old-school, letter-writing romantic. I know it's out of style, and not a lot of women go for that these days, but that's what I go for.
Andre Holland
#41. I don't think there's any great mystery to writing female characters, so long as you talk to them. If you lived in a monastery and never met any women, maybe it would be difficult.
Ken Follett
#42. Bad writing's like bad women: there's just not much you can do about it
Charles Bukowski
#43. I think that we're in a really amazing time, where there are really a lot of really fantastic female actresses and comedians. I imagine there's just a lot of opportunity for women to have powerful roles. Or it's just that there's more women writing TV. Women tend to maybe write strong women.
Whitney Cummings
#44. Women's fiction doesn't sound like anything but a slur to my ears.
Sheila Heti
#45. Try being an indie author, a minority author, a woman, and a person with health issues in the world of traditional - that's where you are clearly 'different' and marginalized. I am all of that, yet I am still here and smiling. Life is good!
Kailin Gow
#46. There's this tradition of women's magazines - which have been my bread and butter as a freelancer - where the paradigm is that the writing is about relationships, body image, lessons, and it's always redemptive.
Meghan Daum
#47. It's about being ourselves, our real best selves, the women God made us to be. It's about reading the writing on our feminine souls - writing engraved there from the moment God formed us in our mothers' wombs - then living what that writing proclaims.
Emily Stimpson
#48. I find myself really feeling like it's possible that maybe the greater contribution I'm going to be able to make through this next phase of my life might be as a writer writing wonderful parts for women, or even writing wonderful parts for myself, you know?
Karen Allen
#49. I just want to keep writing characters who are interesting and complicated people and interesting roles for women, in TV or film or in theater. I think that's like my 'Blues Brothers' mission.
Elizabeth Meriwether
#50. I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.
Paul Auster
#51. I like writing flawed women, and being one, it's something I feel I can write with some veracity and authority.
Callie Khouri
#52. Stop looking for that person you were in the past. She has changed. Look for the person she has grown into. She is wiser and stronger than than ever before. Don't go back to who you were. Cherish who you are." --Without a Voice by Chris Pepple
Chris Pepple
#53. I'm interested in things women do that aren't spoken about. Manto's stories let me breathe. They make me feel like less of a monster.
Mohsin Hamid
#54. It's extremely important for women to be writing their own stories and giving them to people to really be emotionally impacted by
Rosario Dawson
#55. Working on newspapers, you're writing to a certain length, often very brief pieces; you tend to look for easy forms of humor - women can't drive, things like that. That's about the level of a lot of newspaper humor. It becomes a form of laziness.
Tom Wolfe
#56. In my own writing, I tend to be very honest, and my goal is to identify something people think but are afraid to say. That's not the general cultural expectation of women.
Meghan Daum
#57. Art is no longer snobbish or cowardly. It teaches peasants to use tractors, gives lyrics to young soldiers, designs textiles for factory women's dresses, writes burlesque for factory theatres, does a hundred other useful tasks. Art is as usueful as bread.
Azar Nafisi
#58. I love writing about black women, but if you go beyond that, we're human beings - and because we're human beings, it's universal for everybody.
Mara Brock Akil
#59. Writing is an act of faith. One must believe and see people who are invisible to others and be faithful to tell half formed stories. It's like being on the trail of an apparition who's repeatedly just out of reach.
K. Youngblood
Katherine Imogene Youngblood
#60. Just as long as newspapers and magazines are controlled by men, every woman upon them must write articles which are reflections of men's ideas. As long as that continues, women's ideas and deepest convictions will never get before the public.
Susan B. Anthony
#61. This thing that I created, this thing I made as a woman, for other women, is worth something. It's worth exactly the same as what a similar thing, built by a man, for men, is worth.
Jennifer Weiner
#62. 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
#63. I don't think I'm interested in writing women's novels anymore.
Carolyn See
#64. There's the same percentage of genius happening in both genders, but there's less women writing scripts and out there looking for the job.
Dan Harmon
#65. It's great for my daughter to see Beyonce and Taylor Swift, women that are in charge of their own careers, writing songs from their own perspective and taking people to task. That's very different from when I was growing up - it was all like, 'Stand by your man.'
Corin Tucker
#66. Martin: Yes, I'd like to go home and do some work. I'm writing a novel about women from the women's point of view.
Caryl Churchill
#67. When a guy writes a scene where a woman does a deviant sex act on camera, it's objectifying. But when a woman writes it, it's feminism.
Whitney Cummings
#68. In my life, looking at other women who have been pregnant while writing, I always feel like it's kind of their most musical or the closest to themselves. I think for me it's such a validating moment, you know. I always knew I wanted to have kids, and I've been making music all my life.
Kelis
#69. People think I'm selling feminism in my books, but what I'm really doing is writing advertising copy for expensive private colleges that most women can't afford anyway. Oh, and try to find a job with a major in English literature. No luck? Joke's on you, sucker!
Mary Gordon
#70. Alan Alda and his wife Arlene are two of the most life-affirming people I've ever met. He espoused equal rights for women while producing, writing, acting in and directing 'M*A*S*H'; he used to commute between the set and home because he didn't want to disrupt his kids' schooling.
Sanjeev Bhaskar
#71. What happened, of course, was that I was writing a play set in the 1940's that was supposed to be somehow representative of black American life, and I didn't have any women in there. And I knew that wasn't going to work.
August Wilson
#72. We have a lot of women on the staff, obviously. It's a predominantly female writing staff and we hire the best people. It's not like we go we need more women or we need four women directing.
Callie Khouri
#74. In the old times, women did not get their lives written, though I don't doubt many of them were much better worth writing than the men's.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#75. Books were always important. I have to thank my father, he filled my life with books. He didn't write but he always read. He was a merchant, he filled the store with cigarette smoke and his friends, all talking about books and politics. It was bad for business. He dealt in women's clothing.
Rawi Hage
#76. I write novels about ordinary women who face seemingly insurmountable odds but through courage and determination find their heart's desire.
Francis Ray
#77. When I first started writing 'Still Missing,' I didn't actually realize I was writing a thriller. I thought it was more women's fiction, but during the many years of rewrites, I kept taking out the boring parts, and then my agent informed me that I had written a thriller.
Chevy Stevens
#78. I never set out to write a book to change women's lives, to change history. It's like, 'Who, me?' Yes, me. I did it. And I'm not that different from other women. Maybe my power and glory was that I could speak my truth as a woman and it was the truth of every woman.
Betty Friedan
#79. There's a horrible stereotype of both the romance writer and the romance reader as somehow undereducated and unprofessional, when in fact there are a number of incredibly well-educated professional women who have chosen to leave their other careers and go into writing romance.
Lauren Willig
#80. Joss Whedon is a hero of mine, and what he's done for women in film and television, particularly when it comes to writing female roles that would typically go to a man, is awesome.
Bryce Dallas Howard
#81. It was terrifying, liberating, and risky. But one day I woke up and decided to try it." (On writing her first novel, "Miss Dreamsville and the Collier County Women's Literary Society")
Amy Hill Hearth
#82. [When asked about Writing Conferences]
You meet people that will change your life.
Susan Wingate
#83. Most of my writer friends are women, and they're all extremely talented, so of course I think the state of contemporary fiction for women is pretty great. Which is to say there is a ton of amazing work out there. These women are writing hard. There's much to be said. We're on it, chief.
Jami Attenberg
#84. I wish writing was a talent that I had. I've tried. Unfortunately, I'm just not talented in the writing department. But, if I was, I would just write complicated roles for women because there's a lack of them.
Eva Mendes
#85. My mom and my sisters were amazing; they always see the good in people. My mom, she doesn't know how to write and read much, but she's one of the most fantastic women I've met in my life.
Riccardo Tisci
#86. In general, though, there's no point in writing hopeless novels. We all know we're going to die; what's important is the kind of men and women we are in the face of this. Sometimes
Anne Lamott
#87. Even monarchs have need of authors, and fear their pens more than ugly women the painter's pencil.
Baltasar Gracian
#88. There's two kinds of women
those you write poems about and those you don't.
Jeffrey McDaniel
#89. It is not a bad idea to get in the habit of writing down one's thoughts. It saves one having to bother anyone else with them.
Isabel Colegate
#90. To be perfectly frank: I don't write women's fiction. I write intimate, gritty, realistic, character-driven fiction that happens to be thrown into the women's fiction category.
Jillian Medoff
#91. If there's ever a woman who's smart, funny, or witty, people are afraid of that, so they don't write that. They only write parts for women where they let everything be steamrolled over them, where they let people wipe their feet all over them.
Teri Garr
