Literature is a place for ...

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.
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 Tillie Olsen

Quotes from the same author

More than in any other human relationship, overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible, responsive, and responsible
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 Tillie Olsen
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.
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 Tillie Olsen
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.
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 Tillie Olsen
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.
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 Tillie Olsen
She would not exchange her solitude for anything. Never again to be forced to move to the rhythms of others.
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 Tillie Olsen