197 Quotes by Marge Piercy

Suppose that a person writes what she must. That is only the first step of becoming a writer. The work must survive the moment of creation. It must get out to an audience. She or he must dare to show the work. She must risk ridicule, misunderstanding, scandal, condemnation, & what's often worse, none of the above: silence. No attention at all.

Looking at my life was very difficult. I think I learned that I haven't been as good a person as I'm inclined to think of myself as. I haven't been as good friend, haven't been as good a person, made a lot of mistakes.

I said, I like my life. If Ihave to give it back, if theytake it from me, let me onlynot feel I wasted any, let menot feel I forgot to love anyoneI meant to love, that I forgotto give what I held in my hands,that I forgot to do some littlepiece of the work that wantedto come through.

I did not always know I would be a writer. Until I had a room of my own, I did not write much at all - no more than any other child who read a lot of books. I began to write fiction and poetry when I first had a room that was truly my own with a door that shut and some measure, however fragile, of privacy.

The sense of being Jewish never left me, but when my grandmother died, I rebelled against Judaism as I knew it then, which was Orthodox. I saw the rituals, a lot of them, as very male, for a long time.

I wrote to make sense out of all the contradictions I experienced and to deal with the pain and loss I was undergoing.

My idea of Hell is to be young again.

I wasn't afraid of being poor; I rather took it for granted. I was good at getting by with very little. I couldn't imagine sacrificing my writing to anything else.

I'm probably the only novelist who has ever written about political fugitives who actually knew a lot about them, had contact with them, and had a realistic notion of how they survived.