Top 15 Hortense Calisher Quotes

The page isn’t all of my life. It’s what I offer from it.

American critics and scholars don’t emendate writers who are women—until we’re well dead. Generally speaking, the pejorative for a woman who writes complexly is “obscure.” A man who is “obscure” however, may well be “profound” and merit interpretation.

(What’s the sensation of writing?) HC: A sense of power and surprise when it’s going well. But always obsessive hope, as you pace an almost familiar terrain. (Surprise at what?) HC: At what can happen under your hand. When the whole becomes greater than the parts. But the real surprise is afterward. When I see that the book has made its own rules. Each one in the end makes its own form.

I think all artists, even the great ones, are combinations of arrogance and innocence. As life goes on we may lose one or the other in some proportion. To function best one must have both. Once I began to write, though, I learned that the ambition can only phrase itself in the book. There’s such an enormous difference in the writer being, and the writer doing.

I don’t want the critic head taking over, as it quickly can. But it can be instructive. I discover what I think about literature. And critique by other writers is the best literary talk.

I think you write better about women if you don’t write about women exclusively. As with any subject.

I am more interested in wars of the mind.

I think of myself as a person—after that as a woman. If one doesn’t, one narrows oneself. And the world...I think it’s ultimately foolish of us to resegregate ourselves. The strengths of sisterhood are possible without that. And the work itself can be as much from the dower of what we are as women as we want it to be.

At their best they’re our moral health—and our hope.

The subject dictates the approach. I don’t consult with myself beforehand. It happens.

Motherhood has no firm curriculum, but it can make you mechanically minded, and it can connect you firmly to physical life.

But you are a feminist, aren’t you? HC: Born. But not orthodox. And the writer part comes first. I’d never write propaganda.

I grew up, you know, in a generation of war novels and macho—Hemingway’s being the most prominent.

When we test out our own insights on how other people might feel, the testing ground is ourselves. Our views on anything from politics to landscape are tinctured with our personality.

That’s the wonder of the English language. That its words can alternate between rough and soft, harsh and sweet. And, best of all maybe, short and long.