Quotes About Literature

Three of my novels and a good number of my short stories are told from the point of view of men. I was brought up in a house of women.

The world's male chivalry has perished out, but women are knights-errant to the last; and, if Cervantes had been greater still, he had made his Don a Donna.

It's always good when women win things in fiction because it tends to be more male-dominated, unlike poetry, which is more equal

The women are always vixens or monsters. They can't just be normal people in the book.

I'm drawn to women who live in a world different from my own. I don't believe you have to marry someone from your own backyard. James Joyce married a woman who never read any of his books.

I do think that memoirs by women are reviewed differently and considered somewhat outside of the canon.

Women can spin very well; but they cannot make a good book of cookery.

The literature of women's lives is a tradition of escapees, women who have lived to tell the tale.

Reading poetry gives me a sense of calm, well-being, and love for humanity - the same stuff more flexible women get from yoga.

I don't think it's by accident that I was first attracted to translating two French women poets.

Men read science fiction to build the future. Women don't need to read it. They are the future.

Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa.

I think that literature quite often emerges from areas where there has been a lack of articulation, like women's writing.

I think people assume that women write about the domestic sphere. Women write about relationships and family. Men do, too, but then it's the Great American Novel.

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

Women's books are kind of discriminated against. If a man writes a book about his family stories, people think of it as literature. If it's a woman, she's 'spilling her guts,' and it's not art.

The perfect woman perpetrates literature as she perpetrates a small sin: as an experiment, in passing, glancing around to see whether anybody notices--and to make sure that somebody notices.

Most books are bought by women.

I am persuaded that foolish writers and foolish readers are created for each other; and that fortune provides readers as she does mates for ugly women.

My generation of writers has been prone to premature illness and death, especially the women. When Black male writers meet it's like a session of the American Diabetic Association.

There weren't too many books by women that were taught in school, so I read those on my own, and the books I read were as accessible as the ones we were reading in school.

I am not a great French woman. George Sand, Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir are great French women.

[The Women's Room] is one of those pieces of fiction that reveals itself in a different way every time. It's incredible.

There's a book called The Women's Room by Marilyn French that was a really big part of my personal feminist awakening growing up that I read.