"No black woman writer in this culture can write "too much". Indeed, no woman writer can write "too much"...No woman has ever written enough."

No woman has ever written enough.

You cannot write unless you write much.

…I think unless black women are writing the pieces, we're being left out the same way we used to be left out of literature. We don't appear in things unless we write them ourselves. In the white male literary establishment women attain what looks like positions of power or influence or economic stability, but they're structured in such a way that they become unthreatening.

Women writers should write a lot if they want to write. Take the English women, for example. What amazing workers.

their feet. That is a black woman’s specialty. The personal essay had become the way that black women writers claim legitimacy in a public discourse that defines itself, in part, by how well it excludes black women. In a modern society, who is allowed to speak with authority is a political act.

Of course I'm a black writer.... I'm not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren't marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call "literature" is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hassidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.

For women writers the systematic discouragement even to attempt to become writers has been so constant and pervasive a force that we cannot consider their literary productions without somehow assessing the effects of that barrage of discouragement.

Women issues are not as hot on the front burner as they ought to be. I doubt that it affected the increase in the number of women writers. Most literary men do not tell out stories well. It is time for the women to pick up the gauntlet.

Too much is written by the men who can't write about the men who do write.

A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.

I feel that no amount of women's participation can be said to be enough.

a lot more women are writing. A lot of people who wouldn’t have written are writing. When a couple of black women speak, the throats of many are opened. Somehow or other they give courage and sound to their sisters.

I feel black women, specifically, have a history of being erased in terms of their literary contributions in America’s literature. In a lot of ways that’s true for women of color in general, so I think the most important part is to keep these women’s voices alive and active and circulating…