Marjorie Liu Quotes

In my long, long years toiling around the publishing industry, I've found that women simply don't stick to the writing with the same fervor that men do.

The gender inequality in book reviewing isn't getting better. Male authors get the majority of review coverage, and male reviewers do most of the reviewing. It's kind of devastating.

Female authors were still using male names when I was young, or they were neatly shoehorned into 'women's books' except for those few that men could always point at when the disparity was pointed out.

There aren't that many female role models in science. There are a couple of women, but mostly you've got Neil deGrasse Tyson, Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss - they're all guys. Bill Nye the Science Guy. I love that guy, but it's all guys.

I'm no use to anybody,' I say. 'I'm a cérébrale, can't you see that?' Thinking how funny a book would be, called 'Just a Cérébrale or You Can't Stop Me From Dreaming'. Only, of course, to be accepted as authentic, to carry any conviction, it would have to be written by a man. What a pity, what a pity!

Readers understand that the books celebrate female power. In the romance novel, the woman always wins. With courage, intelligence and gentleness she brings the most dangerous creature on the earth, the human male, to his knees.

Having books published is very destructive to writing. It is even worse than making love too much. Because when you make love too much at least you get a damned clarte that is like no other light. A very clear and hollow light.

Write the best book you possibly can, then dedicate yourself to getting people to read it.

Men are now also in the minority among the entering traditionally male-dominated areas such as law and medicine. Finance and politics are still firmly in male hands, but in many other areas it seems the proportions are shifting in women's favor. Boys are doing worse at school and university. It's only logical that this imbalance, which can be observed in most industrialized countries, will change conditions on the job market.

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

There are only three things which make life worth living: to be writing a tolerably good book, to be in a dinner party of six, and to be traveling south with someone whom your conscience permits you to love.

You must write every single day of your life... You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads... may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.

Why does the writing make us chase the writer? Why can't we leave well enough alone? Why aren't the books enough?

A female writer does definitely get more attention if she writes about male characters. It's true. It's considered somehow more literary, in the same way that it's more literary to write about supposedly male subjects, such as war. You're considered more seriously by the literary establishment.

Writing a book is quite an undertaking and I wouldn't want to do it just to do it.

By about the sixth romance I knew I wasn't in exactly the right place. I liked writing action. And I wanted to write a book with a little more edge than I was allowed in romance.

I am a failure as a writer. The publishers won't publish me, the bookshops won't carry my books, the critics won't write about me. I am excluded from all anthologies, and completely ignored.

I would say [I love] writing, because lately I've been finishing my book.

I have SO many books I didn't sell. Some my agent rejected outright, others made it all the way to my editor to be turned away. Not everything is a winner, which is tough when you've devoted eight or nine months of your life to something.

[Alex] Haley had a tendency to write even more frequently and voluminously to his agents and his editors than he did putting pen to paper in his own books.

Having books published is very destructive to writing.

Writing a book is hard. It turns out, writing a second book is twice as hard.

Meryl [Stripe]spoke out about the low percentage of female critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Why are there 760 male critics and just 168 women? You are immediately [biased] on what kind of films you are being told to go see. What are you told are good films? Male films.

I looked at the world of books and just went, Oh my gosh, if I'm writing novels, I'm on the same shelves as Jane Austen and Charles Dickens and Petronius - whereas with comics, they've only been doing them for a hundred years, and there's stuff that nobody's done before. I think I'll go off and do some of the stuff no one's ever done before.

"War gives men a plain-and-simple something to do ... Women write diaries in the hope that their words will beckon fate." It's a romantic manifesto.