A Quote by Patti Smith

I don't care whether they're men or women, that's bullshit. A good writer can get into any gender, can get into any mouth. When I write I may be a Brando creep, or a girl laying on the floor, or a Japanese tourist, or a slob like Richard Speck. You have to be a chameleon when you're writing.
I really don't see any men sitting in the corner office plotting to keep women out. All the men I know are actively trying to promote women, to get more women involved. These men have wives they care about; they have daughters they desperately care about. So I don't think it's fair to blame men - or I don't think it's accurate to blame men anymore.
Write regularly, whether you feel like writing or not, and whether you think what you're writing is any good or not.
Something happens in the middle when women are in their 30s, and we can start with an array of things that happen, whether it is - you hope this doesn't exist any longer - but overt discrimination; whether it's subtle gender discrimination, which absolutely does exist among men and women; whether it's the fact that it gets hard to juggle at that point children, housework, etc. But people still have to go home and cook the dinner and clean the dishes and get the beds made and so on. And so, for a whole bunch of reasons, women tend to fall out in their 30s still today.
You know I really don't like to think about the fact that I'm a girl in relation to the music industry. I was just a kid who wrote down thoughts to organize her brain and that turned into music, like any other writer or musician... so, I happen to be a girl. I don't consider that part of it really.. It may disappoint some feminists out there that I don't want to harp on women and men being equal.
I think it's a really excellent time to be a woman in music. A lot of the past was women fighting to be where women are now. Every once in a while I'll get the, "Oh, you're a pretty good guitar player for a girl," bullshit like that. But that's all changing.
When it comes to writing characters, whether men or women, I think a good writer writes good characters. I know many men who, for years, have written strong, progressive women characters.
If I write a paragraph and I don't get a certain lift from it, if I don't feel connected to it emotionally, then it's dead to me. When I'm reading other fiction writers, if I don't get any emotional investment from the writer, if it's just intellectual or clever - you know, most writing that passes as deep is just clever - I don't feel any connection.
When people say to me, 'Why are you so good at writing at women?' I say, 'Why isn't everybody?' Obviously there are differences between men and women - that's what makes it all fun. But we're all people. There's a lot of good writers who are very humanist, but still manage to kind of skip fifty-five per cent of the race. And I just don't get that. Not to be able to write an entire gender? To me, the question isn't how do you do it? It's how can you possibly avoid doing it?
But it feels good to love a thing and not expect anything back. It feels good to not get an argument or any pushiness or any rumors or any bullshit. It's love without strings. It's ideal.
Write a story a great writer would write. Because part of becoming an artist is pushing through all the disbelief of those around you, deciding that you are a writer when you have no idea what a plot is or whether what you've written is any good, or anything.
Eat as much as you'd like. My philosophy has always been that all women desire to be as fat as myself but just have a great fear of doing so. Because they think they won't get any men, but you will. You'll get more men, and better men.
I've never translated more than one book by any author. But I'm fascinated by translators who have, like Richard Zenith, who's translated so much of Fernando Pessoa's work. I get restless for a new kind of influence. The books I've translated are books I want to learn from as a writer, to be intoxicated by. And translation is an act of writing in itself. It's an act of recreation - of a writer's cadence and tone and everything that distinguishes the voice in the book.
One of my passions is women in business and helping women to get ahead in business. For women, that feedback loop can be broken. Women won't get as much feedback from male bosses as men will get. Therefore, they have to make an extra effort, whether that is unfortunate, good, bad, indifferent.
Richard Price got a million dollar advance on one fake film book based on a paragraph outline and is able to seduce gullible White reviewers who know less about ghetto life than he. The New York Times has devoted more space to Price's tourist, ghetto writing than to any Black writer in history.
The more women help one another, the more we help ourselves. Acting like a coalition truly does produce results. Any coalition of support must also include men, many of whom care about gender inequality as much as women do.
I write every day... I never get ideas unless I'm actually writing. Ideas I get in the shower don't do me any good.
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