Latest Marge Piercy Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• I am a driven writer. I feel guilty if I don't write, not self-indulgent if I do.

  Marge Piercy

  Writing, Self, Guilty

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

• It's really important to visit a site you are writing about. Even if you know it well, even if you have lived there, it's important to take a fresh look in terms of your characters and your story.

  Marge Piercy

  Character, Writing, Important

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

• Suspense is one of the ways you persuade a reader to become engaged and stay engaged with your work.

  Marge Piercy

  Way, Suspense, Reader

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

• 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.

  Marge Piercy

  Fun, Why Not, Apologizing

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

• Everything you study, everything you learn, makes you a better writer, because you have more understanding of how things work.

  Marge Piercy

  Understanding, Study

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

• 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.

  Marge Piercy

  Political, Novelists, Realistic

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

• Obviously I find women more interesting than men to write about.

  Marge Piercy

  Writing, Men, Interesting

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

• Listening is terribly important if you want to understand anything about people. You listen to what they say and how they say it, what they share and what they are reticent about, what they tell truthfully and what they lie about, what they hope for and what they fear, what they are proud of, what they are ashamed of. If you don't pay attention to other people, how can you understand their choices through time and how their stories come out?

  Marge Piercy

  Lying, People, Choices

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

• 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.

  Marge Piercy

  Art, Reading, Fiction

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

• Every poet has a certain amount of "stuff." That's what you draw from for imagery. The more stuff you know well, not simply intellectually but sensually, emotionally, intimately, the wider the pool from which you draw.

  Marge Piercy

  Stuff, Pool, Poet

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

• One of the best gifts you can give a poet is to present them with field guides - to rocks, to stars, to birds, to wildflowers, to trees and bushes, to butterflies, to reptiles and amphibians. Because when you look at anything long enough to be able to identify it, you see far more clearly and you make a tiny beginning at understanding the life, the place, the history of that bird or rock or mammal.

  Marge Piercy

  Stars, Butterfly, Rocks

  Source: margepiercy.com

• 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.

  Marge Piercy

  Cat, Important, Fabric

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

• 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.

  Marge Piercy

  Character, Cat, Quirky

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

• 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.

  Marge Piercy

  Horse, Animal, Pigs

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

• 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.

  Marge Piercy

  Reading, Cat, Body

  Source: margepiercy.com

• 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.

  Marge Piercy

  Writing, Sacrifice, Littles

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

• I did not always know I would be a writer. Until I had a room of my own, I did not write much at all - no more than any other child who read a lot of books. I began to write fiction and poetry when I first had a room that was truly my own with a door that shut and some measure, however fragile, of privacy.

  Marge Piercy

  Children, Book, Writing

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

• I wrote to make sense out of all the contradictions I experienced and to deal with the pain and loss I was undergoing.

  Marge Piercy

  Pain, Loss, Contradiction

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

• 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.

  Marge Piercy

  Girl, Fighting, Class

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

• My grandmother was very important to me. She gave me my religious education. She gave me a sense of the female side of Judaism, of the rich store of stories and legends of the women of the schtetl.

  Marge Piercy

  Religious, Grandmother, Important

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

• Depressions, local and larger strikes, boom times, wars, repressions, all impact a life as do epidemics such as AIDS and pollution that may take years off a person's life. We all, whether we like it or not and whether we acknowledge it or not, are impacted by the racial attitudes we carry within us, and experience in some form every time we turn on the television, the radio, go to a movie, read a magazine or a newspaper, or walk down the street.

  Marge Piercy

  Attitude, War, Epidemics

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

• 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.

  Marge Piercy

  Fighting, Media, Soup

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

• 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.

  Marge Piercy

  Stress, Thinking, People

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

• 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.

  Marge Piercy

  Life Is, Economic, Circumstances

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.

• When midlist writers are treated like dirt, I would desist were I less stubborn and less committed.

  Marge Piercy

  Stubborn, Dirt, Committed

  Interview with Charlotte Templin, margepiercy.com. May 2004.