I shall speak about women’s writing about what it will do.

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

Womanists and feminists whether they are women or men should continue to ventilate what it means to be a woman through writing – that it does not mean she is second-rate.

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.

Certainly, female writing exists, but mainly because even writing is powerfully conditioned by the historical-cultural construction that is gender. That said, gender has an increasingly wide mesh, its rules have been relaxed, and it is more and more difficult to reconstruct what has influenced and formed us as writers…

Because woman is the essence, the first voice of life, and the mother of this earth. Because she is the flower of every home. Because woman is a magnificent being. Women deserve for us to write about them, to write in their voice, and to express their inner selves because they carry in their hearts the secret of the universe and the letters of love in its purest form. No matter how many lines we write, how much we delve into the letters of language, or how many stories and narratives we tell, we will always remain standing at the threshold of woman, waiting for her to tell us her rich human experience throughout the ages and epochs.

what’s a writer for? The whole point is to put yourself into other lives, other heads—writers have always done that. If you screw up, so someone will tell you, that’s all. I think men can write about women and women can write about men. The whole point is to know the facts. Men have so often written about women without knowing the reality of their lives, and worse, without being interested in that daily reality.

If you wish to be a writer, write.

(Why have there been so few really great women writers?) EW: Well, I think there have been not a few great women writers, of course, Jane Austen. I don't see how anyone could have a greater scope in knowledge of human nature and reveal more of human nature than Jane Austen. Consider Virginia Woolf. The Brontës. Well, you know as many as I do: great women writers.

Today we know that there are African women writers who can ensure that the history of women is written down for future generations, who can convey the emotions, aspirations, suffering and achievements of African women.

I have chosen to write about women, because I am not one myself, and because I have always preferred to write about subjects which do not tempt me to be so arrogant as to believe that I can ever fully understand them, but above all because many women seem to me to be looking at life with fresh eyes, and their autobiographies, in various forms, are the most original part of contemporary literature

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.

To be a good writer, you not only have to write a great deal but you have to care. You do not have to have a complicated moral philosophy. But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of a solution, to understand a little about life and to pass this on.

Writers write because they have stories they need desperately to tell, and things they need just as vitally to say. It's not something where you have to go out and find an idea to write about, they're begging to be written. If you have nothing to say, and no story to tell...and I'm not being harsh, just honest...you're probably not a writer.