Feminist Literature Quotes

There is still a funny notion that women should not write violent fiction.

I really connect to strong feminist writers that make their ideas accessible for the rest of the world.

The simple act of telling a woman's story from a woman's point of view is a revolutionary act: it never has been done before.

I always try to avoid looking at the section where my books would be shelved, but I do know that my most reliable neighbor to the right is Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening', which is dispiriting. That's a book I don't want to re-read.

I think there is a great tendency toward autobiography among women today. It is perhaps facile - and I say that even though I have written one myself.

Octavia Butler, of course, is brilliant and disturbing.

Creatively, most of my influences come from the literary world: Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara. Writers are my heroes.

When I first read Margaret Atwood's novel 'The Handmaid's Tale,' it was Saudi Arabia as I knew it that came to mind, not a dystopian future United States as in the new television adaptation.

Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.

I'm incredibly pleased to be working with Marco Palmieri and Tor Books on 'The Geek Feminist Revolution.' This was an exciting book to pitch and is proving to be a lot of fun to put together.

Let woman be a plaything, pure and fine, like a precious stone, illumined with the virtues of a world not yet come.

Everyone knows 'Little Women.' Most women love it if they've read it. If they haven't, they might love the movie, or they've heard of it.

Of Virginia Woolf: The talent of this generation which is most certain of survival.

Those stories weren't being written at all - stories about women's inner lives and outer activism. We've come miles and miles, but we still don't have an equal rights amendment yet. We don't have equal pay yet. There's a lot of blind misogyny that's not personal, but institutionalized. We still have work to do, but even just looking at those old Ms. Magazines is a cool thing to do - to see how daring they were. They just went right into the belly of the beast.

Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.

I think that The Second Sex will seem an old, dated book, after a while. But nonetheless, a book which will have made its contribution. At least, I hope so.

Women's studies needed a syllabus and so invented a canon overnight. It puffed up clunky, mundane contemporary women authors into Oz-like, skywriting dirigibles. Our best women students are being force-fed an appalling diet of cant, drivel and malarkey.

I wish writing was a talent that I had. I've tried. Unfortunately, I'm just not talented in the writing department. But, if I was, I would just write complicated roles for women because there's a lack of them.

I've read 'Valley of the Dolls' at least four times. It's so epic!

Men aren't actively writing women to oppress them, men are writing what they know. I say you can be much better as a woman for women's rights if you just go up there and write your own material.

Now I would say I'm absolutely a feminist writer.

Like Broadway, the novel, and G-d, feminism has been declared dead many times

Like everbody, I'm addicted to 'The Handmaid's Tale.'

People will sometimes say, "Why don't you write more politics?" And I have to explain to them that writing the lives of women IS politics.

Great women scholars like Jane Harrison and Gisela Richter were produced by the intellectual discipline of the masculine classical tradition, not the wishy-washy sentimentalism of clingy, all-forgiving sisterhood, from which no first-rate book has yet emerged. Every year, feminists provide more and more evidence for the old charge that women can neither think nor write.