A Quote by Maggie O'Farrell
I have no control, of course, over how I'm marketed. It's a sad thing, though, that so many people perceive literature to be gendered. The idea that some subjects are male and some are female is just preposterous to me. It's reductive and nonsensical, to separate writers and subjects and plots along gender lines. It's meaningless.
Related Quotes
Is there a gender gap in the music industry? It is true that there are more professional male music creators than female. For some reason, it's taking a lot longer in music than in literature and the visual arts to reach equilibrium. It was almost acceptable by the 19th century for female writers to be published, yet it's only in the last couple of decades, since about 1980, that historical female composers have really emerged.
The problem with reality TV is that creative writers are not involved; TV folks are, and some journalists who will only mine the surface of subjects. Hard work necessary for discovering and delineating the intimacies of the subjects they capture is mostly avoided.
When you take the best of universities in the world, all of them have research and education contiguous; the person who teaches you could be a Nobel laureate. Some subjects are at the tri-junction of many subjects put together.
For the record, this isn’t a male/female thing. It’s a people thing. You talk about men being cold...you should see women from my standpoint. We’re talking the Arctic tundra would be warmer. Believe me, you don’t want to know my vantage point on your gender. As a man, if I grabbed your breasts, I’d be arrested. Any idea how many women have felt free to grab my crotch at will? (Acheron)
I don't have control over how people choose to perceive me. The only thing I have control over is my writing.
Youngsters are coming up with so many new ideas and doing small budget films, which is good. Even my daughter thinks of some subjects that are strange and different. But when I discussed it with some writers, they said it's fantastic. So I think young people are able to think something different. It's great!
I didn't mind studying. Obviously math and the physical science subjects interested me more than some of the more artistic subjects, but I think I was a pretty good student.
Maybe just as many women writers as male writers could be billed as the next great American writer by their publisher. Maybe book criticism sections could review an equal amount of female and male writers. Maybe Oprah could start putting some books by women authors in her book club, since most of her audience is women.
Of course now we know that couldn't be further from the truth, that the subjects that keep young people's options open and unlock doors to all sorts of careers are the Stem subjects.
Some preachers master thier subjects; some subjects master the preacher; once in awhile one meets a preacher who is both master of, and also mastered by his subject. The apostle Paul, I am sure, was in that category.
For me, the banner that I want to wave in terms of giving a jump start to writers of any gender is just to make female protagonists as complex as their male counterparts.
Because gender can be uncomfortable, there are easy ways to close this conversation. Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes - that sort of thing. But the point is this: we are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not.
My concern with this approach is that music becomes a substance devoid of people. It's a consumer model of what music is: subjects listening to objects. For me, music is subjects listening to subjects. It's about intersubjectivity.
Some people perceive Skinner to be complex. I just basically was trying to remember my lines, so I guess that's what they perceive as being complexity.
Reviewing the literature on love I noticed how few writers, male or female, talk about the impact of patriarchy, the way in which male domination of women and children stands in the ways of love.
But there is another and greater distinction for which no truly natural or religious reason can be assigned, and that is the distinction of men into kings and subjects. Male and female are the distinctions of nature, good and bad the distinctions of heaven; but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth inquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or of misery to mankind.
Related Authors
Charles Bukowski Quotes
American
Novelist
Charles Dickens Quotes
English
Novelist
Chuck Palahniuk Quotes
American
Novelist
Ernest Hemingway Quotes
American
Novelist
George Eliot Quotes
British
Novelist
George Orwell Quotes
British
Novelist
George R. R. Martin Quotes
American
Novelist
Jane Austen Quotes
British
Novelist
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Quotes
German
Novelist
Margaret Atwood Quotes
Canadian
Novelist
Nicholas Sparks Quotes
American
Novelist
Paulo Coelho Quotes
Brazilian
Novelist
Sarah Dessen Quotes
American
Novelist
Stephenie Meyer Quotes
American
Novelist
Veronica Roth Quotes
American
Novelist
Victor Hugo Quotes
French
Novelist