Latest Alix Kates Shulman Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• There is a lot of gender segregation. You still have many poor women who work in women-only jobs. In the family, in most cases, only women have the double job of working outside the home and taking care of the family.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Jobs, Home, Work Out

• Being alone for a woman is probably much more scary than for a man. I'm all for getting over our fears by facing them head-on.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Men, Scary

• There is still nothing like equality for women in jobs, in family. There's just an awareness that inequality is not acceptable.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Jobs, Awareness, Inequality

• Many people spend the ends of their lives alone, and probably a lot of years in the middle of their lives, and I'm glad I had the opportunity to experience the rewards of solitude.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Opportunity, Years, People

• Solitude offers a lot that being coupled or being in a group does not. It helps us learn what we are capable of.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Solitude, Groups, Doe

• Ever since Freud, being alone has been considered something of a psychological failure. The point, according to Freudian theory, is to be able to love and connect. But I don't believe that at all. I think that being alone and being coupled and being in a group are all natural states in which people can thrive.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Believe, Thinking, People

• Everything is connected. There is no such thing as an island, especially in our world, global village, the whole thing. Pollution from way across the ocean circulates in the air.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Ocean, Islands, Our World

• When farming became a corporate venture, and the distribution of food became corporate, the variety of foods that were considered good diminished greatly. I know that there's a lot of misconception about this, that people think we have more food variety than ever before, but, in fact, if you read any of the studies, you'll find we have fewer foods than before.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Thinking, People, Venture

• The world is abundant with food for us, and with everything we need, if only we just open our eyes. There's so much food that gets thrown out or never harvested.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Eye, Needs, World

• Our society has very much limited our choices, even regarding the food we think acceptable.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Thinking, Choices, Our Society

• As I experienced life on the island, without electricity, plumbing or telephone, I thought it was important to show that people can live as I did without dying or falling apart. I wanted people to understand that we don't need everything that our culture tells us we have to have to be satisfied.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Fall, Islands, People

• In my books, my idea is always to explore social context and social forces.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Book, Ideas, Social

• I am not a psychological novelist, and I try very hard not to allow the reader to see the plight or circumstances of the characters as individual psychological plights. That's my preference; still, a lot of people do read my novels as psychological studies, and they're right to read them that way too, if that's what they mean to them.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Character, Mean, People

• People often say to me now, "Your work changed my life." I'm sure that's an exaggeration, but they say it had a big effect on them and enabled them to change. I'm not sure I believe that a book will cause someone to change.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Believe, Book, People

• Fiction is ideally suited to re-creating the important emotional aspects of history.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Emotional, Creating, Important

• One important part of historical recording is to get people of another generation to understand the feelings, the passion that went into social transformation. That's why oral history is so valuable.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Passion, People, Feelings

• Usually, ordinary histories don't get the emotional feel of a period. That's what a novel can do.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Emotional, Ordinary, Periods

• I think you get mentally ill being homeless. Most of the bag ladies wind up mentally ill pretty quickly - what people would call paranoid - because they are in such danger. I don't know if it's really paranoia because they are in great danger. Terrible things happen to them, and they lose everything. How could they not become at the very least severely depressed?

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Thinking, Wind, People

• The movement for women's liberation was about an emotional transformation, an explosion, a feeling all over the country that things must be different, and ideas about how they should be. I think fiction can capture that kind of thing better than other genres because in fiction you can explore the feelings of your characters - the before and the after.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Country, Character, Emotional

• I am a feminist. I'm trying to show the relationships between men and women, always the structural relations, not individual villains. I'd never make a husband a villain. I try very hard in my work not to - because if I made one man a villain, the rest would be off the hook. I'm interested in the system of oppression.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Husband, Men, Feminist

• I don't really think myself that sex work is necessarily more demeaning than other kinds of demeaning work.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Sex, Thinking, Kind

• I see old age not as something to hide from or dread (though there is much to oppose in the usual treatment of the old) but rather as something to embrace as the natural and inevitable end.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Age, Usual, Natural

• When you witness the end of a life up close day by day, you begin to understand time and mortality in profound ways. You see time's relativity, death's necessity.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Profound, Way, Mortality

• For two years I watched my parents' lives wind to a close. This made me aware of old age as a one stage, the final one, of a long journey.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Journey, Years, Wind

• It's always difficult to write honestly of one's deepest feelings, particularly without the protective veil of fiction. But the more difficult, the more rewarding if one succeeds. Rewarding not only to the work but to one's peace of mind.

  Alix Kates Shulman

  Writing, Feelings, Mind