Tillie Olsen Quotations

The clock talked loud. I threw it away, it scared me what it talked.

There are worse words than cuss-words, there are words that hurt.

And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total?

I know that I haven’t powers enough to divide myself into one who earns and one who creates.

Time granted does not necessarily coincide with time that can be most fully used.

Women have the right to say: this is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades.

Be critical. Women have the right to say:This is surface, this falsifies reality, this degrades.

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.

Writers in a profit making economy are an exploitable commodity whose works are products to be marketed, and are so judged and handled.

Lighting does occasionally strike and occasional the result isn't a corpse.

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.

I could not live by literature if only to begin with, because of the slow maturing of my work and its special character.

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.

Compared to men writers of like distinction and years of life, few women writers have had lives of unbroken productivity, or leave behind a 'body of work.' Early beginnings, then silence; or clogged late ones (foreground silences); long periods between books (hidden silences); characterize most of us.

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.

It is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption, not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil.

Better immersion than to live untouched.

Every woman who writes is a survivor.

That's what I want to be when I grow up, just a peaceful wreck holding hands with other peaceful wrecks ...

Not to have an audience is a kind of death.

She would not exchange her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others.

More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, and responsible

It is a long baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion than to live untouched.

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.