Literary Exclusion Quotes

Reduced... to a crude formula, the Russian tragedy is precisely the tragedy of a society in which literature turned out to be the prerogative of the minority.

If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.

Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever.

When I was growing up I loved reading historical fiction, but too often it was about males; or, if it was about females, they were girls who were going to grow up to be famous like Betsy Ross, Clara Barton, or Harriet Tubman. No one ever wrote about plain, normal, everyday girls.

Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Do you know that there are libraries in our country that will not stock a book by a Negro writer, not even as a gift? There are towns where Negro newspapers and magazines cannot be sold except surreptitiously. There are American magazines that have never published anything by Negroes. There are film studios that have never hired a Negro writer. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

When my novels are packaged as exclusively for women, I'm not only cut off from a vital portion of my audience but clearly labelled as an author the literary establishment is free to dismiss.

As far as I was concerned, it was the absence of women in the poetic tradition which allowed women in the poems to be simplified. The voice of a woman poet would, I was sure, have precluded such distortion. It did not exist.

The canon is dominated by books written by men, about men, and for men - the male voice is therefore not a particularly difficult one to impersonate.

I don't care about being a literary personality - that doesn't appeal to me, especially because the literary world doesn't appeal to me. I actually don't feel like I even belong in it. If this was high school, I would be sitting with the Goths, looking at everyone, being like, 'Whatever.'

Living in a cultural milieu where the foreign writers most widely available and admired were Russian, I came very late to postwar American writers, and I had great trouble with the canonically exalted white male writers I tried first.

Science fiction is the ugly stepchild of mainstream literature, and fantasy is the ugly stepchild of science fiction, and tie-in novels are the ugly stepchild of fantasy... and on and on and on.

What is taught in schools generally in the West Indies is that if something is your thing, it's better than anybody else's because it's yours. It's extremely provincial and also damaging. You prevent people from learning things. The biggest absurdity would be, 'Don't read Shakespeare because he was white.'

Comparing Asian writers mainly to other Asian writers implies that we're all telling the same story - a disappointingly reductive view.

The problems faced by writers of color are analogous to the problems face by women writers.

The label YA actually means nothing except that the protagonists, or some of them, are young. Publishers like it because it is a secure marketing niche. But the cost of security is exclusion from literary consideration.

I get upset about what is taken as great literature and what is cute and exotic.

There are many Latino writers as talented as I am, but because we are published through small presses, our books don't count. We are still the illegal aliens of the literary world.

As publishers focus on blockbusters, they steadily lose interest in little-known authors from other countries.

women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. ... 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.

The forward march of American literature is usually chronicled by way of its male novelists. There is little sense, in that version of the story, that women writers of those eras were doing much worth remembering.

Women writers specifically... are the ultimate outsiders.

It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as 'other.'

So many Indian novels, quite unfairly, do not get the prominence they should because they have been written in a language other than English.

We have been teaching 'Paradise Lost' and 'Julius Caesar' to the students but we are not teaching them 'Kalidas' or Indian drama and epics.

I did not know that 'poetess' was an insult, and that I myself would some day be called one. I did not know that to be told I had transcended my gender would be considered a compliment. I didn't know — yet — that black was compulsory. All of that was in the future. When I was sixteen, it was simple. Poetry existed; therefore it could be written; and nobody had told me — yet — the many, many reasons why it could not be written by me.