. . . it took me some years to discover what I was. Which was a writer. By which I mean not a "good" writer or a "bad writer" but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. . . 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

While I was painting the downstairs hall I thought of a novel to write. Really I just thought of a character; he more or less wandered into my mind, wearing a beard and a broad-brimmed leather hat. I figured that if I sat down and organized this character on paper, a novel would grow up around him. But it was March and the children's spring vacation began the next day. 

Anne Tyler 

My life has been public, active, and busy to the point of constant turmoil, tumult, and trauma. Sometimes the only quiet and private place where I could write a sonnet was in the bathroom, because that was the only room where the door could be locked and no one would intrude.

Margaret Walker 

Once, I was told a story by a famous writer. "I will tell you what women writers are like," he said. The year was 1971. The women's movement had made men nervous; it had made a lot of women write. "Women writers are like a female bear who goes into a cave to hibernate. The male bear shoves a pinecone up her ass, because he knows if she shits all winter, she'll stink up the cave. In the spring, the pressure of all that built-up shit makes her expel the pine cone, and she shits a winter's worth all over the walls of the cave." That's what women writers are like, said the famous writer. He told the story with such geniality; he looked as if he were giving me a wonderful gift. I felt I ought to smile; everyone knows there's no bore like a feminist with no sense of humor. I did not write for two months after that. It was the only time in my life I suffered from writer's block. I should not have smiled. But he was a famous writer and spoke with geniality. And, in truth, I did not have the courage for clear rage. There is no seduction like that of being thought a good girl.

Mary Gordon

Was I, as a writer, done for? So much of Women's Folly, literary and otherwise, makes us feel constricted by experience rather than enlarged by it. Curled around my baby, feeling more anger and protectiveness than love, I thought of at least two sources of folly resistance Women's Folly lacks. It lacks all conviction that women have the ability to plan their lives for periods of longer than nine months, and it lacks the courage to believe the experience, and the expression of that experience, may simply be different, unique, rather than "greater" or "lesser."

Alice Walker

Some years ago when I returned south, my picture in the paper prompted several neighbors to come visit. "You a writer? What all you write?" Before I could begin the catalogue, one old gent interrupted with -- "Ya know Miz Mary down the block? She need a writer to help her send off a letter to her grandson overseas." So I began a career as the neighborhood scribe -- letters to relatives, snarling letters to the traffic chief about the promised stop sign, nasty letters to the utilities, angry letters to the principal about that confederate flag hanging in front of the school, contracts to transfer a truck from seller to buyer, etc. While my efforts have been graciously appreciated in the form of sweet potato dumplings, herb teas, hair braiding, and the like, there is still much room for improvement -- "For a writer, honey, you've got a mighty bad hand. Didn't they teach you penmanship at that college?" Another example, I guess, of words setting things in motion. 

Toni Cade Bambara

. . . if I had not decided that, once for all, I do not like to write and like it less and less, that neither writing nor even reading the greatest books constitutes a purpose for me and therefore the whole enterprise is not worth undertaking; if I had not, as I keep advising my students,chained myself to my chair, then I would not be sitting here post-coital, urgent, and "inspired" at three a.m., happy.

Janet Burroway

My book was turned down by eleven publishers during that year, and finally Benet asked me to put the book back in the Yale Series, saying of course it would have to stand in the competition. But he did publish it that year. A great deal of my life has involved that preliminary "no" and a final "yes," and I felt very lucky. . . .

Muriel Rukeyser

The good thing about becoming older is that you gain time from that much more experience and can see where the real stories are. So many landscapes impose themselves upon the one I look out on as I write this.

Gail Godwin