Marguerite Young

It's the thing I never could write, the idea of identity and passage of the soul.

I like Gertrude Stein, and spent two weeks with her at the University of Chicago.

I see myself as traditional even though I know you see my work as experimental. I don't really consider Sterne, Joyce, and Proust experimental either because the tradition of their writing goes back a long way. Traditional. The Grand Tradition.

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.

I was not influenced by Joyce although he's a great writer, and I love his work. I was influenced by Saint Augustine.

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.

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.

When you have examined all the illusions of life and know that there isn't any reality, but you nevertheless go on, then you are a mature human being. You accept the idea that it is all mask and illusion and that people are in disguise. You see the crumbling of reality and you accept it.

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.

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

If you don't have obsessions, don't write. my characters are obsessed.

I would say my theme has always been paradise lost, always the lost cause, the lost leader, the lost utopia.

I never thought of myself as either a woman or a man. I thought of myself as a person who was born to a writer, who was doomed to be a writer.

I believe that all my work explores the human desire or obsession for utopias, and the structure of all my works is the search for utopias lost and rediscovered.

The first money I ever had was when I received an award from the American Association of University Women.

I knew Anais Nin, who called me after I had been away for a few years. She was seeking help because at that time no one would give her a decent review. She was made fun of.

All the books I have written have been one book, from the beginning.

I don't believe there can be a poetic novel without political consciousness. I have a strong political conscience.

At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age.

There were also some cruel reviews by women, but the tone of the male reviewers, sometimes hysterical, was different. I have suffered, but I don't want to name names-but there have been men who have seemed to want to destroy me or my writing, men I don't even know.

If there is no certain reality, the idea of following a leader must be scrutinized.

A lawyer I once knew told me of a strange case, a suffragette who had never married. After her death, he opened her trunk and discovered 50 wedding gowns.

I would teach from nine to four, sleep an hour, and write from six until midnight, night after night.

Dreiser... I love... and almost wouldn't speak to anyone who ever attacked him.

I think there is a rage against women. I've come to see that now although at the time I did not notice it. I was preoccupied with my teaching and my writing.