Women Writer Quotes

#1. My biggest advice for women writer/directors is to always be attempting to make work that avoids pandering to the conceptions that the industry has put in place for "women directors."

Rania Attieh

#2. 'In the Cut' was not what readers expected of me. Before it was published, I was seen as a women's writer, which meant that I wrote movingly about flowers and children.

Susanna Moore

#3. There was a little movie I did called 'Women In Trouble' that a friend of mine made. That, to me, was a very satisfying project. It was shot so quickly during the writer's strike, and there was no money. It was a really fun project.

Sarah Clarke

#4. If women could ejaculate, I would have exploded hot jizz all over my manager's face. Instead, I hugged him. (about getting the SNL gig as a writer)

Sarah Silverman

#5. [Patricia Highsmith] was a figure of contradictions: a lesbian who didn't particularly like women; a writer of the most insightful psychological novels who, at times, appeared bored by people; a misanthrope with a gentle, sweet nature.

Andrew Wilson

#6. It's funny, I'd rather be known as a writer who crafted a really nice piece about women's friendships over time. But that doesn't roll off the tongue like 'YouTube sensation.'

Kelly Corrigan

#7. People who label erotica writers as sluts/men-whores remind me of the mob that once condemned smart women as witches. Mankind has not evolved much.

Anna Bayes

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

Nancy Lynn Jarvis

#9. 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

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

Doris Lessing

#11. You know, Mamet is not a huge writer of female parts. Most of his movies don't even have women in them, so I'm lucky I'm in it at all.

Elle Macpherson

#12. 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

#13. Each time we had a visiting writer, I asked what she thought of women and humor. By the end of the year, I had perfected my question and asked Adrienne Rich why there was so little written about women and humor. She looked at me right in the eye and said, 'You write it.' I took that as an order.

Kate Clinton

#14. Then I read Little Women, and of course, like a lot of really young girls, I was very taken with Jo - Jo being the writer and the misfit.

Patti Smith

#15. Name?" the desk clerk said to me politely, her pencil poised.
"Name," I said vaguely. I remembered, and told her.
"Age?" she asked. "Sex? Occupation?"
"Writer," I said.
"Housewife," she said.
"Writer," I said.
"I'll just put down housewife," she said.

Shirley Jackson

#16. 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

#17. I write about real life as it is lived by the young American Muslim women that I've had the pleasure of meeting throughout the course of my travels as a writer and being able to speak in different places and meet different people at signings and things.

G. Willow Wilson

#18. I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.

Jeanette Winterson

#19. If I were not a writer, I would spend more time doing the things that I am already doing, which include doing research in physics, teaching, and running a nonprofit organization with a mission to empower women in Cambodia.

Alan Lightman

#20. The tragedy in the lives of the people is in what does not happen, rather than in what does happen -in all they do not realise.

Ethel Carnie -Miss Nobody

Ethel Carnie Holdsworth

#21. I found that the writer who says SUBLATA LUCERNA NULLUM DISCRIMEN INTER MULIERES ('when the lamp is taken away, all women are alike') says true; but without love, this great business is a vile thing.

Giacomo Casanova

#22. In college, I wrote newspaper articles and songs. Then, on my 21st birthday, I sold my first book. It was a nonfiction book about women pirates - 'Pirates in Petticoats.' After that, I was a book writer for good.

Jane Yolen

#23. 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

#24. To be a great writer you must be fearless with your words.

Karmel Graham

#25. 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

#26. Feminism, as writer Marie Sheer remarked in 1986, "is the radical notion that women are people," a notion not universally accepted but spreading nonetheless.

Rebecca Solnit

#27. A writer looks at an issue and asks, 'What if this were to occur? Or what if that was thrown into the mix? What would that look like?

Venita Ellick

#28. I want to design for the working women. Okay well - it sounds like 90% of us are that. But really, we are more. We are working women who like to cook, to travel; we are a girlfriend, a writer. We are so much more than just being defined by the one job we have.

Sarah Lafleur

#29. Grace Paley once described the male-female writer phenomenon to me by saying, "Women have always done men the favor of reading their work, but the men have not returned the favor.

Shirley Jackson

#30. 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

#31. And what is life without the company of wine, women and good weather.

Avijeet Das

#32. A writer's work is never done until death closes the book.

Linden Morningstar

#33. With 'Suffragette,' I was emboldened that there were so many women around me. We had a female writer, producers, production and costume designers.

Sarah Gavron

#34. I was surprised to find myself in tears. Because these women had trusted me to help as a writer, I began to see a way of bringing together two things - writing and activism - that until then had torn me apart in everyday life.

Gloria Steinem

#35. Comedy can be, especially in a writer's room, really aggressive, kind of a very male-dominated room, and it would be hard for women. It's not a nurturing place. It's not like a lot of women are going to say, I can't wait to live that lifestyle and be in a writer's room until 2 or 3 a.m.

Ellen DeGeneres

#36. I don't think that women necessarily always write like women. I was a writer on the 'Comedy Central Roasts' for a while, and I always wrote the jokes that people assumed the men would write.

Whitney Cummings

#37. I was challenged to a fistfight by Margo Jefferson, the Pulitzer Prize winner, New York Times writer, who is part of a feminist clique at the Times, which believes that Black men are the principal threat to the women of the world.

Ishmael Reed

#38. I'm so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer.

Bell Hooks

#39. Everything I've done in my life has been by instinct. I never had any doubt I could do anything ... I always knew I was going to be a writer.

Elizabeth Riddell

#40. I love writing for women. The willingness to go from laughter to tears in a moment is the greatest palette you can paint with as a writer.

Michael Patrick King

#41. As a male writer, women are always what men pursue, and their world is always a mystery. So I always tried to present as many views as possible on women's worlds.

Gao Xingjian

#42. The existence of the writer is to write, and to write is to tell the truth.

Azar Nafisi

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. I think having women behind the cameras is exciting - whether it's as a director or a writer or a producer - because it does feel like we're in the middle of this awakening of realizing that it's important for women to have a voice.

Mary Elizabeth Ellis

#46. 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

#47. Inside every great writer there is a naked girl trying to get out.

Chloe Thurlow

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. A writer who presents men and women as creatures truncated below the waist is exposed as one who goes about without his trousers saying, 'see, I have had my testicles removed.'

Norman Lindsay

#51. 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

#52. 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

#53. Tennessee Williams is an incredible writer for women because, in many ways, his women characters are him. He writes so passionately.

Laila Robins

#54. The female experience is different from that of the male, and if, as a male writer, you cannot accept that basic premise, then you will never, ever, be able to write women well.

Greg Rucka

#55. 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

#56. Men like women who write, even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.

Marguerite Duras

#57. I haven't been in a job situation in which I was competing with other women. As a writer, you're more likely to be treated as an individual.

Gloria Steinem