Marge Piercy
People are very afraid of any controversy. We've become very passive spectator types. And when the kids were protesting globilization - quite reasonably - they really got bashed.Collection: Kids
Sometimes when a character in a novel is difficult for me to enter, I sue something in myself or in my own life as a doorway into that character's mind and emotions.Collection: Character
There are obviously a great many ways to organize some fraction of the material in a life.Collection: Way
I think that if you use something from you life in fiction, it metamorphosizes into something strange and different. Afterward it is hard to tell what actually was part of your life and what is part of the story of the fictional character.Collection: Character
Any life is lived in a particular time and place. Every life is impacted by the family's socio-economic circumstances, and, in later life, by the person's.Collection: Life Is
The incidence of violent brand-loyalty to one's own current dogma has risen.Collection: Loyalty
When midlist writers are treated like dirt, I would desist were I less stubborn and less committed.Collection: Stubborn
i find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in peopleCollection: Depressing
We admire predators - panthers, lions, tigers, even wolves. Maybe to be naturally thoughtful and hesitant to use violence is to be somehow second rate. To be in the middle of the social food chain. Especially if you're a man. This society thinks real men are violent.Collection: Real
Now that I am in my forties, she [my mother] tells me I'm beautiful; now that I am in my forties, she sends me presents and we have the long, personal and even remarkably honest phone calls I always wanted so intensely I forbade myself to imagine them. How strange. Perhaps Shaw was correct and if we lived to be several hundred years old, we would finally work it all out. I am deeply grateful. With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.Collection: Beautiful
I don't even remember what Mother and I quarreled about: it is a continual quarrel that began when I reached puberty.Collection: Mother
History is a game played backwards only.Collection: Games
I wasn't afraid of being poor; I rather took it for granted. I was good at getting by with very little. I couldn't imagine sacrificing my writing to anything else.Collection: Writing
I am my mother's daughter,... I am her only novel.Collection: Daughter
Obviously I find women more interesting than men to write about.Collection: Writing
It hurts to love wide open stretching the muscles... It hurts to thwart the reflexes of grab, of clutch; to love and let go again and again.Collection: Love
I never thought of myself as explaining cats in general. I simply viewed the cats I have known as characters in my life, often as quirky and complex as the humans with whom I have spent time.Collection: Character
We live in a media soup and are constantly being programmed or are fighting that programming. Thus any truthful account of a life, every part of a life, is about society as well as an individual.Collection: Fighting
I communicate much better with cats, usually. I know them and their body language - as my own cats know mine very well. Cats are adept at reading subtle signals.Collection: Reading
We may be losing the ability to understand animals who are not pets or horses. We have less contact with them. We don't (most of us) tend to know even cows and pigs, let alone bears or wolverines or red tailed hawks.Collection: Horse
I'm probably the only novelist who has ever written about political fugitives who actually knew a lot about them, had contact with them, and had a realistic notion of how they survived.Collection: Political
On this twelfth day of my diet I would rather die satiated than slim.Collection: Slim
Troubles cured you salty as a country ham, smoky to the taste, thick-skinned and tender inside.Collection: Country
A strong woman is a woman at work, cleaning out the cesspool of the ages, and while she shovels, she talks about how she doesn't mind crying, it opens the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up develops the stomach muscles, and she goes on shoveling with tears in her nose.Collection: Strong Women
The art of fiction is one of constant seduction. You must persuade the reader on page 1 to start reading - on page 50, or page 150 and yes, on page 850.Collection: Art
Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.Collection: Cures
Love says, mine. Love says, I could eat you up. Love says, stay as you are, be my own private thing, don't you dare have ideas I don't share. Love has just got to gobble the other, bones and all, crunch. I don't want to do that. I sure don't want it done to me!Collection: Ideas
The anger of the weak never goes away, Professor, it just gets a little moldy. It molds like a beautiful blue cheese in the dark, growing stronger, and more interesting. The poor and the weak die with all their anger intact and probably those angers go on growing in the dark of the grave like the hair and the nails.Collection: Beautiful
Where I came from, the nights I had wandered and survived scared them, and where I would go they never imagined.Collection: Night
I don't apologize for being sexually adventurous. Why not? It was often fun. When it wasn't - I didn't continue what wasn't pleasant.Collection: Fun
Every artist creates with open eyes what she sees in her dream.Collection: Dream
The ruling class isn't dissatisfied: they are healthy, well-fed, live in beauty, enjoy their own importance: fun-loving cannibals.Collection: Fun
I think having a great range of experiences in my life had helped me as a writer, particularly a writer of fiction. I have known a great many different sorts of people in different situations, and I have a notion how very well of badly people can behave in times of stress or danger or violence.Collection: Stress
I don't find that writing about parts of my life had much effect except in some cases to improve my memory. To get into parts of the past I want to recall very vividly, I use a form of directed meditation.Collection: Memories
With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.Collection: Mother
If I observe my cats carefully, it is partly because I observe everyone I deal with as carefully as I can and partly because they amuse and entertain me. They are an important part of the fabric of my daily life.Collection: Cat
I was a working class Jewish girl. In my girlhood, anti-Semitism was a daily fact of life in Detroit. I did not come from people who had many options in their lives or many choices open to them. I was a girl in a family in which women were, as in society at large, very much second-class citizens. I did not see why I should accept these forced limitations without a fight. Being free to make my own choices thus became very important to me at an early age.Collection: Girl
Writing is a futile attempt to preserve what disappears moment by moment.Collection: Writing
Everything you study, everything you learn, makes you a better writer, because you have more understanding of how things work.Collection: Understanding
In fiction, I exercise my nosiness. I am as curious as my cats, and indeed that has led to trouble often enough and used up several of my nine lives. I am an avid listener. I am fascinated by other people's lives, the choices they make and how that works out through time, what they have done and left undone, what they tell me and what they keep secret and silent, what they lie about and what they confess, what they are proud of and what shames them, what they hope for and what they fear. The source of my fiction is the desire to understand people and their choices through time.Collection: Lying
A new idea is rarely born like Venus attended by graces. More commonly it's modeled of baling wire and acne. More commonly it wheezes and tips over.Collection: Ideas
The sense of being Jewish never left me, but when my grandmother died, I rebelled against Judaism as I knew it then, which was Orthodox. I saw the rituals, a lot of them, as very male, for a long time.Collection: Grandmother
I said, I like my life. If Ihave to give it back, if theytake it from me, let me onlynot feel I wasted any, let menot feel I forgot to love anyoneI meant to love, that I forgotto give what I held in my hands,that I forgot to do some littlepiece of the work that wantedto come through.Collection: Hands
The price of seeing is silence.Collection: Silence
I wrote to make sense out of all the contradictions I experienced and to deal with the pain and loss I was undergoing.Collection: Pain
Remember that every son had a mother whose beloved son he was, and every woman had a mother whose beloved son she wasn't.Collection: Mother