“I never intended to write solely about Arab characters, or even primarily about them, but because they were such a big part of my first two novels and my memoir, people reckoned that was my main literary terrain. It wasn’t really a deliberate decision to move away from Arab characters in my later books, but more a desire to paint on a broader canvas, one that was closer to my day-to-day experience.”

Acceptance speech of the National Book Award for Nonfiction (1952); also in Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson (1999) edited by Linda Lear, p. 91
Context: The winds, the sea, and the moving tides are what they are. If there is wonder and beauty and majesty in them, science will discover these qualities. If they are not there, science cannot create them. If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry.

Source: Dash & Lily's Book of Dares

On how she formulates her characters in “An Interview with Tracy Chevalier” https://fictionwritersreview.com/interview/an-interview-with-tracy-chevalier/ in Fiction Writers Review (2019 Sep 23)

Source: On how she “protected” her characters in her first novel Where the Line Bleeds in “Jesmyn Ward: ‘Black girls are silenced, misunderstood and underestimated'” https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/may/11/jesmyn-ward-home-mississippi-living-with-addiction-poverty-racism in The Guardian (2018 May 11)

In The Making (1970)

Source: Snakehead

Source: Art Talk, Conversations with 15 woman artists 1975, p. 78.

The Paris Review interview (1982)
Context: You know C. S. Lewis, whom I greatly admire, said there’s no such thing as creative writing. I’ve always agreed with that and always refuse to teach it when given the opportunity. He said there is, in fact, only one Creator and we mix. That’s our function, to mix the elements He has given us. See how wonderfully anonymous that leaves us? You can’t say, “I did this; this gross matrix of flesh and blood and sinews and nerves did this.” What nonsense! I’m given these things to make a pattern out of. Something gave it to me.
I’ve always loved the idea of the craftsman, the anonymous man. For instance, I’ve always wanted my books to be called the work of Anon, because Anon is my favorite literary character. If you look through an anthology of poems that go from the far past into the present time, you’ll see that all the poems signed “Anon” have a very specific flavor that is one flavor all the way through the centuries. I think, perhaps arrogantly, of myself as “Anon.” I would like to think that Mary Poppins and the other books could be called back to make that change. But I suppose it’s too late for that.