As Women’s History Month comes to a close, it seems appropriate to highlight some of history’s most prominent female authors. In their own words, here are their thoughts and musings about writing and the writing life. Let their words be an inspiration and motivation for your own work.
Do you have a favorite quote about writing, either from the collection below or one that is not represented?
“The best time to plan a book is while you’re doing the dishes.”
Agatha Christie
“Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
Sylvia Plath
“I could not write a serious romance under any other motive than to save my life.”
Jane Austen
“The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self; to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.”
Toni Morrison
“Writing nonfiction is more like sculpture, a matter of shaping the research into the finished thing. Novels are like paintings, specifically watercolors. Every stroke you put down you have to go with. Of course, you can rewrite, but the original strokes are still there in the texture of the thing.”
Joan Didion
“You must not only know how to write, but you have to be privately, personally, sound at the core. Not sane, but sound. If not, it always shows.”
Martha Gellhorn, war correspondent
“To write something, you have to risk making a fool of yourself.”
Anne Rice
“The book to read is not the one that thinks for you, but one which makes you think.”
Harper Lee
“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.”
Margaret Atwood
“I am a woman, and I am a Latina. Those are the things that make my writing distinctive. Those are the things that give my writing power.”
Sandra Cisneros
“Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic, capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it.”
J.K. Rowling
“Language is an intrinsic part of who we are and what has, for good or evil, happened to us.”
Alice Walker
“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.”
Anne Frank
“Women and fiction remain, so far as I’m concerned, unsolved problems.”
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
“Invention, it my be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.”
Mary Shelley
“When I go back and read my journals or fiction, I am always surprised. I may not remember having those thoughts, but they still exist and I know they are mine, and it’s all part of making sense of who I am.”
Amy Tan
“After awhile, the characters I’m writing begin to feel real to me. That’s when I know I’m heading in the right direction.”
Alice Hoffman
“Good books, like good friends, are few and chosen; the more select, the more enjoyable.”
Louisa May Alcott
“Write about the emotions you fear the most.”
Laurie Halse Anderson
“Writing is a process, a journey into memory and the soul.”
Isabel Allende
“Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon.”
Ann Patchett
“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page.”
Annie Proulx
“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.”
Anaïs Nin
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
Maya Angelou
The Regal Writer 