Literary Empowerment Quotes

Books were my pass to personal freedom.

I can't imagine I could have become the person I am now without books. Books became synonymous with freedom. They showed that you could open doors and walk through.

If they won't write the kind of books we like to read we shall have to write them ourselves.

Television captures the mind but does not liberate it. A good book at once stimulates and frees the mind.

As a novelist, I have a somewhat higher soapbox to stand on than most people do when it comes to talking back to the merchants of fear.

I would have written 'Brown Girl Dreaming' if no one had ever wanted to buy it, if it went nowhere but inside a desk drawer that my own children pulled out one day to find a tool for survival, a symbol of how strong we are and how much we've come through.

The world was hers for the reading.

What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote.

I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don't write to protect them. It's far too late for that. I write to give them weapons-in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.

You didn't grow up in the shadow of John Steinbeck. He put you on his shoulders and gave you all the light you wanted.

My generation of young female writers discovered that we could dictate the form and content of our own fiction.

I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.

It is the writer's privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart.

Anyone who says, 'Books don't change anything,' or - more commonly - that crime fiction is the wrong genre for promoting social change - should take a closer look.

I just wanted to put together the best Latinx writers. I didn't care about the level.They have a passion for 'Vida' in a different way, in a higher way.

I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.

I am passionate about reading, for myself and for kids. Our future as a compassionate, productive, healthy society is rooted in our continuing to engage our minds and spirits. The key for me is in keeping it joyful as an activity.

Women began their inner emancipation by their access to literature, by access to the world through books; an access they could not have socially or politically, or of course economically, in the world at large.