72 Quotes by Marguerite Young

I've been willing to go for years without publishing. That's been my career.

Is it experimental to have been influenced by the Bible? By Saint Augustine?

My first attempt to write about Robert Owen was in the form of poetry. Then I turned it into a blank verse poem, but I discovered that I couldn't fit in all the facts, which are fabulous. I decided to rewrite it a third time, still retaining every image I had already written in the first two versions.

I had read the histories of mountain climbers, of suffragette captains, of travelers to the Middle East... all the ladies who went to the Middle East. I'd like to go myself. I didn't invent anything in my book. I didn't need to.

I think the category between fiction and non-fiction is nothing. The poetry of non-fiction is as fabulous as any poetry you could ever write in fiction. Poets have greatly influenced me. The only difference between the novel as poem and the lyric as poem is the difference in length.

I think that the style is the writing, a beautiful sense of style. And if you don't have it, it doesn't matter what you write, it doesn't really make any difference. I'm not speaking of realistic novels now, but of the pseudo-poetic novel or short story.

Just as I do not want my students to imitate my style, I admire authors who write differently from me. Lewis and Dreiser didn't try to write in a poetic style.

Like Kay Boyle, whose work I'm wild about, I could have married, written a book with every baby, a baby with every book.

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.