That's the hardest thing to do-to stay with a sentence until it has said what it should say, and then to know when that has been accomplished.

- Vivian Gornick

What you feel when you're writing is the relief of thinking: if you write the sentence correctly, you're clarifying. If you write the right sentence,…

- Vivian Gornick

You are the instrument of your own illumination.

- Vivian Gornick

The point of women's liberation is not to stand at the door of the male world, beating our fists, and crying, 'Let me in, damn you, let me in!' The p…

- Vivian Gornick

The older I grow, the more I realize how unfit we are for relationships. We are all such antagonists. It's part of the human condition to be deeply u…

- Vivian Gornick

The idea that money brings power and independence is an illusion. What money usually brings is the need for more money - and there is a shabby and pa…

- Vivian Gornick

Psychoanalysis showed me that I might be neurotic because I was a girl but, as Chekhov might have put it, I alone had to squeeze the slave out of mys…

- Vivian Gornick

Writing enters into us when it gives us information about ourselves we are in need of *at the time that we are reading.* How obvious the thought seem…

- Vivian Gornick

Every work [of literature] has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emoti…

- Vivian Gornick