A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.
Marguerite Young

A lawyer I once knew told me of a strange case, a suffragette who had never married. After her death, he opened her trunk and discovered 50 wedding gowns.
Marguerite Young

All creatures are flawed, but out of the flaw may come the universe.
Marguerite Young

All my writing is about the recognition that there is no single reality. But the beauty of it is that you nevertheless go on, walking towards utopia, which may not exist, on a bridge which might end before you reach the other side.
Marguerite Young

All the books I have written have been one book, from the beginning.
Marguerite Young

At the age of 18 all young poets are sure they will be dead at 21 - of old age.
Marguerite Young

Dreiser... I love... and almost wouldn't speak to anyone who ever attacked him.
Marguerite Young

I believe that all my work explores the human desire or obsession for utopias, and the structure of all my works is the search for utopias lost and rediscovered.
Marguerite Young

I don't believe there can be a poetic novel without political consciousness. I have a strong political conscience.
Marguerite Young

I knew Anais Nin, who called me after I had been away for a few years. She was seeking help because at that time no one would give her a decent review. She was made fun of.
Marguerite Young


I never fantasized or invented a thing, not one thing. I knew every single thing I ever wrote about.
Marguerite Young

I never thought of myself as either a woman or a man. I thought of myself as a person who was born to a writer, who was doomed to be a writer.
Marguerite Young

I think most people don't like others who, without a voice of their own, emulate the other. I certainly don't want anybody just to pick up my thoughts and hand them back to me.
Marguerite Young

I think there is a rage against women. I've come to see that now although at the time I did not notice it. I was preoccupied with my teaching and my writing.
Marguerite Young

I would never write realistic prose. I don't like people who try to write in a poetic style, but in the course of their book abandon it for realism, and weave back and forth like drunkards between the surreal and the real.
Marguerite Young

I would say my theme has always been paradise lost, always the lost cause, the lost leader, the lost utopia.
Marguerite Young

I would teach from nine to four, sleep an hour, and write from six until midnight, night after night.
Marguerite Young

I'm as much influenced by Joseph Smith and the Mormons as I am, more so, than by Eliot. Actually, I'm much more influenced by the poetry of the Mormons.
Marguerite Young

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.
Marguerite Young

I've been willing to go for years without publishing. That's been my career.
Marguerite Young