‘I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.’
Jane Austen
‘Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.’
Margaret Atwood
‘Male writers are thought of as “writers” first and then “men”. As for female writers, they are first “female” and only then “writers”.
Elif Shafak
‘Women then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own.’
Virginia Woolf
‘There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.’
Maya Angelou
‘The best time for planning a book is while you’re doing the dishes.’
Agatha Christie
“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 housewife,” she said.
Shirley Jackson
‘I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.’
Joan Didion
‘If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.’
Toni Morrison
‘If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.’
Emily Dickinson
‘Be ruthless about protecting writing days.’
J.K. Rowling
‘Writing a novel is a terrible experience during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I’m always irritated by people who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.’
Flannery O’connor
‘I’ve always known what I’m meant to do. The path of my life has been about discovering what I need to do to support myself as a writer.’
Ottessa Moshfegh
‘Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea.’
Iris Murdoch
‘I try to have reasonably happy endings because I would hate any child to be cast down in gloom and despair; I want to show them you can find a way out of it.’
Jacqueline Wilson
