What did we talk about?I don’t remember. We talked so hard and sat so still that I got cramps in my knee. We had too many cups of tea and then didn’t want to leave...

When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think...

When my brother,…, was a young boy learning the Chinese classics, I was in the habit of listening with him and I became unusually proficient at understanding those passages that he found too difficult to...

Women and fiction remain, so far as I am concerned, unsolved problems.

Loving ourselves is a revolutionary act!

Already the people murmur that I am your enemybecause they say that in verse I give the world your me.They lie, Julia de Burgos. They lie, Julia de Burgos.Who rises in my verses is not...

Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that...

The next time you get scared, get sacred!

Ce que j’aimais sans mesure chez ces sept femmes (lesquelles ayant pris le risque de vivre sans prudence ne purent éviter celui d’en souffrir) c’était leur puissance poétique, c’était la gr ce de leur écriture,...

Life for both sexes – and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement – is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures...

The only way to leave the circle, to stop dancing with the jailer, is to find a way to preserve one’s individuality, that unique which evades description but differentiates one human being from the other.

What wouldn’t my people give for a few bites of the biryani she ordered me to throw away yesterday because she said it smelt?

Does it explain my astonishment the other day when Z, most humane, most modest of men, taking up some book by Rebecca West and reading a passage in it, exclaimed, ‘The arrant feminist! She says...

If a writer starts worring about what he or she has left out or forgotten, they might not be able to write even a single line.

Does rough weather choose men over women? Does the sun beat on men, leaving women nice and cool?’ Nyawira asked rather sharply. ‘Women bear the brunt of poverty. What choices does a woman have in...

She felt she had been created by the demands of others, by their insatiable appetite for something beyond ordinary life. They craved a world without death and they had spotted her, in their hunger, like...

What is it about us lady authors and our fascination for the exclamation mark?

Women writers make for rewarding (and efficient) lovers. They are clever liars to fathers and husbands; yet they never hold their tongues too long, nor keep ardent typing fingers still.

Our mothers were largely silent about what happened to them as they passed through this midlife change. But a new generation of women has already started to break the wall of silence.

A man once asked me … how I managed in my books to write such natural conversation between men when they were by themselves. Was I, by any chance, a member of a large, mixed...

Favoring ‘resolution’ the way we do, it is hard for us men to write great love stories. Why?, because we want to tell too much. We aren’t satisfied unless at the end of the story...

I was not rescued by a prince; I was the administrator of my own rescue.

I am protective of the gentle slope of stomach bulging like an early pregnancy, at my waist. I’ve earned its existence with everything I’ve been forced to swallow.

If I ask you to think about something, you can decide not to. But if I make you feel something? Now I have your attention.

They were from different generations, culture, nations. But even these things did not divide them so much as their separate conceptions of what it meant to be a woman.

My dis-interest in what people speak of as “women’s problems,” “women’s literature.” Have women a special sensibility? No. There are individuals uniquely talented & uniquely equipped to interpret the complex symbolism of the world but...

I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. She died young–alas, she never wrote a...