Silence is the bluntest of blunt instruments. - Erica Jong

Dancing is like fucking... it doesn't matter how you look - just concentrate on how you feel.

As a writer, I feel that the very source of my inspiration lies in my never forgetting how much I have in common with other women, how many ways in which we are all-successful or not-similarly shackled. I do not write about superwomen who have transcended all conflict; I write about women who are torn, as most of us are torn, between the past and the future, between our mothers' frustrations and the extravagant hopes we have for our daughters. I do not know what a writer would write about if all her characters were superwomen, cleansed of conflict. Conflict is the soul of literature.

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.