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Writers are not here to conform. We are here to challenge. We're not here to be comfortable—we're here, really, to shake things up. That's our job.

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It's a symbiotic process, writing. What I am makes the books—not part of me, all of me—and then the books themselves inform the sense of what I am. So...more

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I believe you have to write every day–make the time. It’s about having an organized mind instead of a chaotic and untidy one. There is a myth that wri...more

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Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

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Language is a finding-place not a hiding place.

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He needed some sort of membrane between himself and experience, which, for him, became language.(Jeanette Winterson on T.S.Eliot)

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Examine this statement: ‘A woman cannot be a poet.’ Dr Samuel Johnson (Englishman 1709-84 Occupation: Language Fixer and Big Mouth.) What then shall I...more

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The words come at my call but who calls whom?

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Saddest of all are the woman who were brought up to believe that self-sacrifice is the highest female virtue.

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The curious are always in some danger. If you are curious you might never come home, like all the men who now live with mermaids at the bottom of the ...more

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I go on writing so that I will always have something to read.

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Women always bring it back to the personal,' said Handsome. 'It's why you can't be world leaders.''And men never do,' I said, 'which is why we end up ...more

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...there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you.

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Mrs Ratlow was a widow, and she was head of English, but she still did all the cooking and cleaning for her two sons, and she never took holidays beca...more

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There are two kinds of writing the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don't want to go....more