Literary history and the present are dark with silences . . . I have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silences--what Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)--that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.

It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil.

Compared to men writers of like distinction and years of life, few women writers have had lives of unbroken productivity, or leave behind a 'body of work.' Early beginnings, then silence; or clogged late ones (foreground silences); long periods between books (hidden silences); characterize most of us.

Better immersion than to live untouched.

Writers in a profit making economy are an exploitable commodity whose works are products to be marketed, and are so judged and handled.

Lighting does occasionally strike and occasional the result isn't a corpse.

I know that I haven’t powers enough to divide myself into one who earns and one who creates.