Tillie Olsen
Tillie Olsen
Tillie Lerner Olsen was an American writer associated with the political turmoil of the 1930s and the first generation of American feminists...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth14 January 1913
CountryUnited States of America
Tillie Olsen quotes about
writing responsibility years
The habits of a lifetime when everything else had to come before writing are not easily broken, even when circumstances now often make it possible for writing to be first; habits of years - responses to others, distractibility, responsibility for daily matters - stay with you, mark you, become you. The cost of discontinuity (that pattern still imposed on women) is such a weight of things unsaid, an accumulation of material so great, that everything starts up something else in me; what should take weeks take me sometimes months to write; what should take months, takes years.
writing survival survivor
Every woman who writes is a survivor.
writing kind audience
Not to have an audience is a kind of death.
lying struggle writing
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.
reality women
Be critical. Women have the right to say:This is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades.
book generosity achievement
Literature is a place for generosity and affection and hunger for equals - not a prizefight ring. We are increased, confirmed in our medium, roused to do our best, by every good writer, every fine achievement. Would we want one good writer or fine book less? The sense of writers being pitted against each other is bred primarily by the workings of the commercial marketplace, and by critics lauding one writer at the expense of another while ignoring the existence of nearly all.
enough knows havens
I know that I haven’t powers enough to divide myself into one who earns and one who creates.
commodity economy profit
Writers in a profit making economy are an exploitable commodity whose works are products to be marketed, and are so judged and handled.
hurt cuss-words
There are worse words than cuss-words, there are words that hurt.
doe results occasional
Lighting does occasionally strike and occasional the result isn't a corpse.
doe granted used
Time granted does not necessarily coincide with time that can be most fully used.
inspirational worry mouths
Better mankind born without mouths and stomachs than always to worry about money to buy, to shop, to fix, to cook, to wash, to clean.
character special literature
I could not live by literature if only to begin with, because of the slow maturing of my work and its special character.
women blood religion
Not everybody feels religion the same way. Some it's in their mouth, but some it's like a hope in their blood, their bones.