Joanna Russ

One thing I have tried to do when I write...was take the sex in my stories and simply make it part of the whole fabric. It’s not special, it’s not sacred, it’s not demonic, it just happens. It’s as much an ordinary part of life as heating your dinner up, or something, and I always worked very hard to get that over.

If you want to be an assassin, remember that you must decline all challenges. Showing off is not your job.
If you are insulted, smile meekly. Don’t break your cover.
Be afraid. This is information about the world.
You are valuable. Push yourself.
Take the easiest way out whenever possible. Resist curiosity, pride, and the temptation to defy limits. You are not your own woman and must be built to last.
Indulge hatred. Action comes from the heart.
Pray often. How else can you quarrel with God?

One of the most exciting things about working in SF for me, a woman, is that SF is so open-ended-it's perfectly possible to imagine a world where sexism doesn't exist, or in which women can be presented in the context of new myths that women can admire or learn from.

Staying in charge of feminism is personally comfortable and personally gratifying for White women and may avoid the struggles and problems talked about his chapter (as well as some others), but if we do, we will lose. Not only we lose allies and our moral decency-no small matter for a radical movement whose position is founded not on armies but on its claims to justice-we will lose something of even greater importance: the ability to understand the interconnections between different kinds of oppression. That is, we will lose any possibility of developing an accurate map of the world. And if we don't have that, we will fail, even in getting anything for ourselves. ("THERE IS A VILLAGE / OVER / THAT HILL", p311)

How withered away one can be from a life of unremitting toil.

I began reading science fiction in the 1950s and got from it a message that didn't exist anywhere else then in my world. Explicit sometimes in the detachable ideas, implicit in the gimmicks, peeking out from behind often intolerably class-bigoted, racist, and sexist characterizations, somehow surviving the usual America-the-empire-is-good plots, most fully expressed in the strange life-forms and strange, strange, wonderfully strange landscapes, was the message:
Things can be really different

Revision, self-criticism, change-all these are essential for any art form to maintain a sense of vitality.

After the first shock you think, "Well, that's over," but what do you do then? The news that kills is the news that makes everything else impossible; you can't sleep or go out or read or watch TV because you can no longer enjoy anything; I had never before realized what a substratum of pure pleasure there is in just going to sleep, for instance. Just eating. All spoiled now. (p63)

The impulse behind fantasy I find to be dissatisfaction with literary realism. Realism leaves out so much.

Courage is willful hope. (p86)

In the summer of 192- there occurred to me the most extraordinary event of my life. (beginning of "The Extraordinary Voyages of Amélie Bertrand")

The key for me wasn't the '60s but the early '70s and the feminist movement. Gloria Steinem once said that women get more radical as they get older because things start to pile up-the alienation, the outsideness. We don't age as men do; there's no reward. We get out or go under. Radicalism for any oppressed group isn't youthful; it's lifelong...Simply being a female so often has the effect of placing women so far out, so far on the margin, so far from being central or important, that when women go radical, they tend to jump a long way. Radicalism partly derives from the basic question, How much have I really got to lose? I'm not sure you can generalize about this, but it seems clear to me, from my recent researches, that black women are frequently more radical than white feminists and black lesbian feminists are more radical still, because just to stay alive they've had to become radical. Like Barbara Smith, Gloria Anzaldua, Cherrie Moraga. Audre Lorde has a collection of essays called Sister Outsider that is magnificent on this topic. There is a tradition of women on the Left being overlooked that I myself just found out about quite recently. I discovered that in the most amazing ways it's always been women who were the most radical figures on the Left. Suppressed radicals, punished radicals. Not only has this happened before, but it's happened and happened and happened and happened. There have been something like two to four feminist movements in the last three hundred years. Dale Spender's book, Women of Ideas, has some evidence of this. We've buried the slave revolts, and we constantly bury radical events like the labor wars.

Only those who have reviewed, year in and year out, know how truly abominable most fiction is.

Real artists, it seems to me, are those who don't repeat themselves"

We need to force the reader always to come back to where we all are. Otherwise, it's pure game playing, escapism. And you fall out with an awful shock.