Sarah Weinman Quotes

Virginia Woolf's great novel, 'Mrs. Dalloway,' is the first great book I ever read. I read it almost by accident when I was in high school, when I was 15 years old.

When I say that George Eliot has long been my hero, I mean to include those aspects of her thought and temperament that have been disparaged or dismissed or ignored. She was, after all, a novelist who did not eschew politics or polemics - sometimes silently though defiantly, as in her relationship with George Henry Lewes.

My professional and human obsession is the nature of language, and my best relationships are with other writers. In many ways, I know George Eliot better than I know my husband.

My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.

Creatively, most of my influences come from the literary world: Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara. Writers are my heroes.

Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?

My mom wasn't, like, she was reading all these historical romance novels the majority of the time. She read a feminist book and then my dad would sit down and explain it to her like she was an idiot.

I didn't even know I was a feminist until I read it on the back of one of my own books.

Those stories weren't being written at all - stories about women's inner lives and outer activism. We've come miles and miles, but we still don't have an equal rights amendment yet. We don't have equal pay yet. There's a lot of blind misogyny that's not personal, but institutionalized. We still have work to do, but even just looking at those old Ms. Magazines is a cool thing to do - to see how daring they were. They just went right into the belly of the beast.

I read "The Group" by Mary McCarthy. It had tons of sex in it, or so I thought at the time.

Virginia Woolf's writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere.

I think there's a whole book being written about it in the UK. I don't know if you can get it here. It's about all the hidden messages and meetings in this and the fact that it is about women and the fact that this cave is full of blood and all this kind of stuff. And when I was making it, I didn't make it with that specifically in mind, but I always had it in the back of mind and I thought, 'Let's just throw it in there and see what people make of it.' And people seem to be making quite a lot of it. So I don't want to spell it out or say this, that or the other.

Each time I undertake to reread Virginia Woolf, I am somewhat baffled by the signature breathlessness and relentlessly "poetic" tone, the shimmering impressionism, so very different from the vivid, precise, magisterial (and often very funny) prose of her contemporary James Joyce.

Literary influences are harder for me to point to, because mostly it's a mulch of all of my past reading.

My prose style at this time was a stomach-twisting blend of the Bible, Carl Sandburg, H.L. Mencken, Jeffrey Farnol, Christopher Morley, Samuel Pepys, and Franklin Pierce Adams imitating Samuel Pepys. I was quite apt to throw in a "bless the mark" at any spot, and to begin a sentence with "Lord" comma.

I really like Shakespeare a lot. The characters that he writes for females, I think, are really great and a lot more compelling than what modern writers write, which is weird because they didn't have actresses then.

Lemberger's stories are marvelous compounds of scholarship, imagination and empathy. Brought to life with rich historical detail, these biblical women, sidelined and silenced for centuries, prove to be audacious, utterly relatable, and spellbinding companions.

I think that The Second Sex will seem an old, dated book, after a while. But nonetheless, a book which will have made its contribution. At least, I hope so.

There's a book called The Women's Room by Marilyn French that was a really big part of my personal feminist awakening growing up that I read.

There is nothing wrong with "women's studies" that studying the right women can't cure, but feminist literary scholars have a penchant for dragging the rivers of deserved obscurity for third-rate neurotics.

The biggest thinker that's influenced my feminism is definitely Bell Hooks, who's a feminist cultural critic, because of her accessibility but also just because she's a genius.

We don't have a clear path forward, and that's been the case for feminism since the 18th century, when the idea of the rights of women actually began.

Virginia Woolf was one example. She was called the "Lover of 100 Gangsters."

Anais Nin shows an occasional grace in writing, but her work is quite foreign to me, precisely because she wants so much to be feminine and not feminist. And then she is so gaga before so many men. She talks about men I know in France, men who were less than nothing, and she considers them kings, extraordinary people.

I think I'm speaking for a bunch of girls when I say that the idea that feminism is completely natural and shouldn't even be something that people find mildly surprising. ...I find a lot of feminist reading quite confusing and that often there's a set of rules, and people will be like, 'Oh, this person isn't a true feminist because they don't embody this one thing,' and I don't know, often there is a lot of gray area that can be hard to navigate.