Top 100 Women Writing Quotes
#1. 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
#2. The dilemma for women - writing after everything else was finished - has prevented women from reaching their literary potential for centuries.
Joan M. Drury
#3. I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.
Anne Enright
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. When you banish me, you who are maryadapurushottham will be writing a law which will render innocent women of coming generations homeless and destitute.
Gita V. Reddy
#7. My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead. Women almost never become art monsters because art monsters only concern themselves with art, never mundane things. Nabokov didn't even fold his own umbrella. Vera licked his stamps for him.
Jenny Offill
#8. 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
#9. I bet there are a lot of women out there who want to sleep with a guy who reads. And being the head of the reading foundation, I'm very well endowed.
Bauvard
#10. I write about nuclear tests in Refuge - "The Clan of One-Breasted Women." With so many of the women in my family being diagnosed with breast cancer, mastectomies led to one-breasted women. I believe it is the result of nuclear fallout.
Terry Tempest Williams
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. To try something longer, I entered a half-hour radio drama contest with the national public broadcaster, CBC. To my surprise, I won. And that opened doors in film and television, because that broadcaster was looking to cultivate new Canadian talent, especially women who could write.
Karen Walton
#15. 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
#16. On Writing About Nora Hawks
I write about a female character to try, in vain, to understand two things: the purpose of life, and women.
Dennis R. Miller
#17. Before there were books, we read each other.
Lisa Cron
#18. 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
#19. When men write women, they tend to write women the way they want women to be, or the way they resent women for being. They don't really - they seldom nail it. It takes a woman to write a really good female character. I like that.
Simon Pegg
#20. 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
#21. Statistically in the UK, there are so many fewer female composers than male songwriters and they're marketed in a way that - females are marketed in a way that they're these independent unique artists writing their own stuff, and they're not, because fourteen percent of PRS goes to women.
Kate Nash
#22. 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
#23. I don't think I'm interested in writing women's novels anymore.
Carolyn See
#24. We should be writing more great roles for women, period. Another problem is that movies are generally made for 14-year-old boys, and 14-year-old boys want to watch 25-year-old action heroes.
James Mangold
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. I've always felt very sympathetic from the first days of writing about women that, whatever the woman, whether she is trying to be a woman in the conventional sense or breaking the boundaries, those struggles are quite difficult.
Susie Orbach
#29. 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
#30. Hunger was constitutional with him,
women, cigarettes, liquor, need need need
until he went to pieces.
The pieces sat up & wrote. They did not heed
their piecedom but kept very quietly on
among the chaos.
John Berryman
#31. What would Miss Frost have thought of me? I wondered; I didn't mean my writing. What would she have thought of my relationships with men and women? Had I ever "protected" anyone? For whom had I truly been worthwhile?
John Irving
#32. 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
#33. She writes things with her movements that I for the life of me could never write with a pen.
Christopher Poindexter
#34. Women can spin very well, but they cannot write a good book of cookery.
Samuel Johnson
#35. Women govern us; let us render them perfect: the more they are enlightened, so much the more shall we be. On the cultivation of the mind of women depends the wisdom of men. It is by women that nature writes on the hearts of men.
Richard Brinsley Sheridan
#36. Everything I write has to be connected to my life. One of the things that always comes up in my writing is the search for freedom, especially in women.
Isabel Allende
#37. I love writing for other actors, women of African descent and people who are generally underrepresented.
Danai Gurira
#38. Just as I cannot remember any time when I could not read and write, I cannot remember any time when I did not exercise my imagination in daydreams about women.
George Bernard Shaw
#39. I write the things that I find most attractive in women. I like intelligence, I like passion - give me a little fire, be strong, don't be wishy-washy, do the right thing.
Nicholas Sparks
#40. Foolish acts and bold adventures almost always appear, especially in the beginning, to be the absolute same thing.
Leigh Ann Henion
#41. Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.
Virginia Woolf
#42. Yes the sex scenes are explicit but we all love the dirty bits!
Airam
#43. People will sometimes say, "Why don't you write more politics?" And I have to explain to them that writing the lives of women IS politics.
Grace Paley
#44. I read the writings of great men and women so that I can think bigger thoughts.
Ron Brackin
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Writing is learned by imitation. If anyone asked me how I learned to write, I'd say I learned by reading the men and women who were doing the kind of writing I wanted to do and trying to figure out how they did it.
William Zinsser
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. As far as I have had opportunity of judging, it appears to me that the usual style of letter-writing among women is faultless, except in three particulars." "And what are they?" "A general deficiency of subject, a total inattention to stops, and a very frequent ignorance of grammar.
Jane Austen
#51. Writing in a foreign language - has brought me to the cries of the women silently rebelling in my youth, to my own true origins.
Assia Djebar
#52. Fiction is about telling a good story, first and foremost. But of course, everything I'm interested in or angry about leaks into my writing, from art to violence against women.
Lauren Beukes
#53. Women who write with an overriding consciousness that they write as women are engaged not in aspiration toward writing, but chiefly in a politics of sex.
Cynthia Ozick
#54. 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
#55. I love writing for and about women. In my whole career I have.
Mitch Glazer
#56. An abstract style is always bad. Your sentences should be full of stones, metals, chairs, tables, animals, men, and women.
Alain De Lille
#57. The existence of the writer is to write, and to write is to tell the truth.
Azar Nafisi
#58. 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
#59. I like to write about women who are talented and capable, but most important, retain their femininity. Women have tremendous power - their femininity, because men can't do without it.
Sidney Sheldon
#60. So writing became a way to get to act in things that I thought were meaningful, and hopefully write stronger roles for other women.
Brit Marling
#61. Foras Road has a sordid reputation ( ... ) Old crones sat in doorways, while their daughters were pushed out to earn money. It is intriguing that a society which is very covert with sexuality should be so straightforward about prostitution.
Tahir Shah
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. In community work, you reach some people, but in writing, I can reach many more people, not only in exploring issues of domestic violence, but also by showing the importance of strong women in communities.
Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
#65. I learned the enormous power of writing for yourself, especially now that people seem to be receptive to the fact that women can write.
Maya Rudolph
#66. 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
#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. I'm not against women. I'm not against men. I just write about me telling my side of how I would say something.
Kool Keith
#69. Having spent a lot of time trying to figure out screenwriting, I do feel moved and I want to try to write good roles for women of every age.
Brit Marling
#70. I'm encouraging these women, like Cheryl Strayed, to take the jump to writing for the screen. She is adapting her book Tiny Beautiful Things for us. They're infinitely capable of tackling the format.
Reese Witherspoon
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. What compromises women - babies, domesticity, mediocrity - compromises writing even more.
Rachel Cusk
#74. Like most little girls, I found the lure of grown-up accessories astonishing - lipstick, perfume, hats and gloves. When I write female characters in my historical novels, getting these details right is vital.
Sara Sheridan
#75. 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
#76. There are enough women to do the childbearing and the childrearing. I know of none who can write my books.
Henry Handel Richardson
#77. I like writing flawed women, and being one, it's something I feel I can write with some veracity and authority.
Callie Khouri
#78. I don't know why he [Darren Star] is so good at writing for women. Maybe he just likes women. I'm not quite sure what the magic recipe is, other than he just knows how to entertain an audience, and he knows when to be gooey and sweet, and when to be provocative and naughty.
Sutton Foster
#79. I am interested in writing how women really feel, how they really think, and how they respond to men. I don't want men reading my books because they might find out too much.
Charlotte Lamb
#80. I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.
Paul Auster
#81. 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
#82. Women writers should write a lot if they want to write. Take the English women, for example. What amazing workers.
Anton Chekhov
#83. A woman who writes commits two sins; she increases the number of books, and decreases the number of women.
Alphonse Karr
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. I'm thrilled to be in sci-fi because they write the women very strong, and you don't often get that on television.
Laura Vandervoort
#89. 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
#90. I just hope this [Emmy] is now a part of the status quo that women of color are included in the narratives that continue to write lead roles for us.
Viola Davis
#91. Truly I never thought of myself as writing legal thrillers, and I still don't think I do. I write stories about women.
Lisa Scottoline
#92. Every word a woman writes changes the story of the world, revises the official version.
Carolyn See
#93. Writing is in fact an entirely outworn, decayed and corrupt convention whose chief & most conspicuous character is its monumental witness to the conservatism, laziness and irrationality of men and women.
Eric Gill
#95. Why do I write today? The beauty of the terrible faces of our nonentities stirs me to it: colored women day workers- old and experienced- returning home at dusk, in cast off clothing faces like old Florentine oak.
William Carlos Williams
#96. When we saw our plane on TV as breaking news, it was the most surreal experience. A lot of the women were crying. There was a gentleman who was writing in his journal and crying. Seeing that isn't easy.
Taryn Manning
#97. Whoever has received knowledge
and eloquence in speech from God
should not be silent or secretive
but demonstrate it willingly.
When a great good is widely heard of,
then, and only then, does it bloom,
and when that good is praised by man,
it has spread its blossoms.
Marie De France
#98. There's two kinds of women
those you write poems about and those you don't.
Jeffrey McDaniel
#99. Even monarchs have need of authors, and fear their pens more than ugly women the painter's pencil.
Baltasar Gracian
#100. 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
