Quotes from Marguerite Young

All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side.

A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.

I don't believe there can be a poetic novel without political consciousness. I have a strong political conscience.

At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age.

I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.

I would teach from nine to four, sleep an hour, and write from six until midnight, night after night.

I think there is a rage against women. I've come to see that now although at the time I did not notice it. I was preoccupied with my teaching and my writing.

When the dream came into being, I always pursued it.

If there is no certain reality, the idea of following a leader must be scrutinized.

I've been willing to go for years without publishing. That's been my career.

I think most people don't like others who, without a voice of their own, emulate the other. I certainly don't want anybody just to pick up my thoughts and hand them back to me.

There were also some cruel reviews by women, but the tone of the male reviewers, sometimes hysterical, was different. I have suffered, but I don't want to name names-but there have been men who have seemed to want to destroy me or my writing, men I don't even know.

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.

Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism.

Is it experimental to have been influenced by the Bible? By Saint Augustine?

If you understand hallucination and illusion, you don't blindly follow any leader. You must know if the person is sane or insane, over the abyss.

The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.

I never fantasized or invented a thing, not one thing. I knew every single thing I ever wrote about.

Life has no beginning, middle or end.

Dreiser... I love... and almost wouldn't speak to anyone who ever attacked him.

He is but as the stubble of the field, and yet he has no beard.

All creatures are flawed, but out of the flaw may come the universe.

The first money I ever had was when I received an award from the American Association of University Women.

If you don't have obsessions, don't write. my characters are obsessed.