With apologies to Flowerchild. If I had posted all these quotes on her thread, I would have hogged it more egregiously than I did (in my enthusiasm). 

 Here, then, is what smart women I admire think about writing:

"Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time. Write yourself. Your body must be heard."  --  Hélène Cixous

"If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don't write, because our culture has no use for it." -- Anaïs Nin

"For it would seem - her case proved it - that we write, not with the fingers, but with the whole person. The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver." -- Virginia Woolf (Orlando)

"Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay. I'm always irritated by people - the ones who imply that writing fiction is an escape from reality. It is a plunge into reality and it's very shocking to the system."                                                   -- Flannery O'Connor

 "The fact that he had foamed at the mouth, immediately upon dying, indicated that he had a great back jam of wishes and desires and truths that were never spoken...out bubbled all the words he had swallowed when he was alive."

--Kaye Gibbons (Charms for the Easy Life)

 "Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows."--   Joyce Carol Oates

"Remember that for all the books we have in print, are as many that have never reached print, have never been written down-even now, in this age of compulsive reverence for the written word, history, even social ethic, are taught by means of stories, and the people who have been conditioned into thinking only in terms of what is written-and unfortunately nearly all the products of our educational system can do no more than this-are missing what is before their eyes. For instance, the real history of Africa is still in the custody of black storytellers and wise men, black historians, medicine men: it is a verbal history, still kept safe from the white man and his predations. Everywhere, if you keep your mind open, you will find the words not written down. So never let the printed page be your master. Above all, you should know that the fact that you have to spend one year, or two years, on one book, or one author means that you are badly taught-you should have been taught to read your way from one sympathy to another, you should be learning to follow you own intuitive feeling about what you need; that is what you should have been developing, not the way to quote from other people."       -- Doris Lessing

 "The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it."    -- Margaret Atwood 

"A story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is."-- Flannery O'Connor

"...Words have been all my life, all my life-- this need is like the Spider's need who carries before her a huge Burden of Silk which she must spin out--the silk is her life, her home, her safety--her food and drink too--and if it is attacked or pulled down, why, what can she do but make more, spin afresh, design anew...."   -- A.S. Byatt (Possession: A Romance)

"The secret is not to write about what you love best, but about what you, alone, love at all." ---Annie Dillard, speaking on writing

"Every book is the wreck of a perfect idea."  -- Iris Murdoch