Feminine Writing Quotes

'In the Cut' was not what readers expected of me. Before it was published, I was seen as a women's writer, which meant that I wrote movingly about flowers and children.

If a woman writes about a domestic situation, everyone automatically assumes that it's about her.

No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia.

Virginia Woolf thought a lot about her own sex when she wrote. In the best sense of the word, her writing is very feminine, and by that I mean that women are supposed to be very sensitive to all the sensations of nature, much more so than men, much more contemplative. It's this quality that marks her best works.

When you write as a woman, there's this feeling there's going to be a softness.

I don't talk about feelings, but I write a lot about feelings. Reading, that's feminine; writing, that's feminine. It is insane - it's really insane - but it still is in me.

There are many women who write as they think they should write - to imitate men and make a place for themselves in literature.

It is this delightful habit of journalizing which largely contributes to form the easy style of writing for which ladies are so generally celebrated. Every body allows that the talent of writing is particularly female. Nature might have done something, but I am sure it must be essentially assisted by the practice of keeping a journal.

I'm interested in dismantling the distinction between masculine and feminine writing both because I think it's a false distinction and, I think, ultimately an insulting one. It's as insulting to men as it is to women. I'm not sure what masculine writing would look like - I assume some combination of Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver. Writing can't be gendered in that way.

It is much easier not to write like a man than to write like a woman.

I fell in love with Virginia Woolf in college. I especially admire how well she writes about daily life, how she captures so much meaning and consequence in the smallest details of a day.

But the novels of women were not affected only by the necessarily narrow range of the writer's experience. They showed, at least in the nineteenth century, another characteristic which may be traced to the writer's sex. In Middlemarch and in Jane Eyre we are conscious not merely of the writer's character, as we are conscious of the character of Charles Dickens, but we are conscious of a woman's presence of someone resenting the treatment of her sex and pleading for its rights.

...black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white, male and female. It's not so much that women write differently from men, but that black women write differently from white women. Black men don't write very differently from white men.

After a long time spent learning how to write as a woman instead of as an honorary man, I was able to come back to Earthsea and write the next three books in another and newer tradition: that of questioning, rather than accepting, the gendering of power as male.

Not all women write the same. But I don't understand why the model is that you're supposed to write like a man, and that means you're a real writer.

there is no 'feminine writing' ... and one makes a mistake is using and giving currency to this expression.

That whole idea of chick lit being a thing that you just lump all the commercial female writers into - it went on for years.I'd switch on the radio, and I'd hear, 'Two female authors are here to discuss chick lit - is it dead?' and I'd think, 'Argh, no, not again. Are we seriously still having this conversation?'

They had always told me that I wrote like a man.

One gets the impression that this is how Ernest Hemingway would have written had he gone to Vassar.

There is something false in this search for a purely feminine writing style. Language, such as it is, is inherited from a masculine society, and it contains many male prejudices. We must rid language of all that. Still, a language is not something created artificially; the proletariat can't use a different language from the bourgeoisie, even if they use it differently, even if from time to time they invent something, technical words or even a kind of worker's slang, which can be very beautiful and very rich. Women can do that as well, enrich their language, clean it up.