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.

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

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.

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.

A woman who writes feels too much,
those trances and portents!
As if cycles and children and islands
weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips
and vegetables were never enough.
She thinks she can warm the stars.
A writer is essentially a spy.
Dear love, I am that girl.

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

There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized. Or even cured.

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.

You must go around the states lecturing to women. And the inoffensive writers who've never dared lecture anyone, let alone women-they are frightened of women, they do not understand women, they write about women as creatures that never existed,

Remember women's silence of centuries; the silences of most of the rest of humanity. Not until several centuries ago do women writers appear. Sons of working people, a little more than a century ago. Then black writers (1950 was the watershed year). The last decades, more and more writer-mothers. Last of all, women writers, including women of color, of working class origin, perhaps one generation removed; rarest of all, the worker-mother-writer.

I said that the greatest female writers, with almost no exceptions, have been childless. A fact. And I have said that women generally, by virtue of their desire to mother, are incapable of the necessarily single-minded focus anyone must bring to the creation of literature, true literature. I don’t retract a word. That is a fact.