Marguerite Young

“A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.”

“I would say my theme has always been paradise lost, always the lost cause, the lost leader, the lost utopia.”

“I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.”

“A lawyer I once knew told me of a strange case, a suffragette who had never married. After her death, he opened her trunk and discovered 50 wedding gowns.”

“If you know anything about James Whitcomb Riley, you know that Little Orphan Annie is one of the most fantastic characters who ever lived in America before Charlie Chaplin.”

“He is but as the stubble of the field, and yet he has no beard.”

“I believe that all my work explores the human desire or obsession for utopias, and the structure of all my works is the search for utopias lost and rediscovered.”

“If there is no certain reality, the idea of following a leader must be scrutinized.”

“The first poem I ever wrote, about loss, when I was 5 years old, expressed the themes of everything I would ever write.”

“I would teach from nine to four, sleep an hour, and write from six until midnight, night after night.”

“Dreiser... I love... and almost wouldn't speak to anyone who ever attacked him.”

“Life has no beginning, middle or end.”

“I think there is a rage against women. I've come to see that now although at the time I did not notice it. I was preoccupied with my teaching and my writing.”

“If you don't have obsessions, don't write. my characters are obsessed.”

“All creatures are flawed, but out of the flaw may come the universe.”

“I think most people don't like others who, without a voice of their own, emulate the other. I certainly don't want anybody just to pick up my thoughts and hand them back to me.”

“I never thought of myself as either a woman or a man. I thought of myself as a person who was born to a writer, who was doomed to be a writer.”

“All the books I have written have been one book, from the beginning.”

“I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.”

“I knew Anais Nin, who called me after I had been away for a few years. She was seeking help because at that time no one would give her a decent review. She was made fun of.”