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Alone, She Took Hot Baths And Sat Exhausted In The Steaming Water, Wondering At Her Perpetual Exhaustion. All That Winter She Noticed The Limp, Languid Weight Of Her Arms, Her Veins Bulging Slightly With The Pressure Of Her Extreme Weariness ... One Day In January She Drew A Razor Blade Lightly Across The Inside Of Her Arm, Near The Elbow, To See What Would Happen.

-Joyce Carol Oates

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Alone, She Took Hot

Joyce Carol Oates

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Alone, She Took Hot Baths And Sat Exhausted In The Steaming Water, Wondering At Her Perpetual Exhaustion. All That Winter She Noticed The Limp, Languid Weight Of Her Arms, Her Veins Bulging Slightly With The Pressure Of Her Extreme Weariness ... One Day In January She Drew A Razor Blade Lightly Across The Inside Of Her Arm, Near The Elbow, To See What Would Happen.

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I Don't Think That Writer's Block Exists Really. I Think That When You're Trying To Do Something Prematurely, It Just Won't Come. Certain Subjects Just Need Time, As I've Learned Over And Over Again. You've Got To Wait Before You Write About Them.

What Is Memory But The Repository Of Things Doomed To Be Forgotten, So You Must Have History. You Must Have Labor To Invent History. Being Faithful To All That Happens To You Of Significance, Recording Days, Dates, Events, Names, Sights Not Relying Merely Upon Memory Which Fades Like A Polaroid Print Where You See The Memory Fading Before Your Eyes Like Time Itself Retreating.

The Strangeness Of Time. Not In Its Passing, Which Can Seem Infinite, Like A Tunnel Whose End You Can't See, Whose Beginning You've Forgotten, But In The Sudden Realization That Something Finite, Has Passed, And Is Irretrievable.

Food Doesn't Exist, But Can Only Be Invented. And Reinvented.

It Is Important For Me To Discover The Ideal Title, For Without This Title The Story Or Novel Isn't Quite In Focus.

Art Is About Freedom Of Expression, And Should Not Be Molded To Fit Any Propaganda Or Lofty Ideal.

The Worst Cynicism: A Belief In Luck.

Much In Our Lives Is Chance.

Shakespeare Would Seem To Have Been A Person For Whom The Human Voice/personality In All Its Splendid Idiosyncrasy Was Absolutely Enthralling.

Adriana Loved Even The Rank Animal Smell Of The Man's Body, Her Sweat-slicked Breasts And Belly Flattened Beneath Him, And Her Arms And Legs Clutching Him As A Drowning Woman Might Clutch Another Person To Save Her Life. Don't Don't Don't Don't Leave Me. Don't Leave Me. As In Animal Copulation The Frenzy Is To Be Locked Together Not Out Of Sentiment Or Choice But Physical Compulsion. As If Bolts Of Electric Current Ran Through Both Their Bodies And Would Only Release Them From Each Other When It Ceased.

When You Give Up Struggle, There's A Kind Of Love.

There Is No Past Anybody Can Get To, To Alter Things Or Even To Know What Those Things Were But There Is Definitely A Future, We Are Already In It.

My Life Is A Very Interior And Solitary Life. I Tend Not To Care That Much About External Things.

How Lovely This World Is, Really: One Simply Has To Look.

The Use Of Language Is All We Have To Pit Against Death And Silence.

It's Rare That We Actively And Consciously 'forget'; Most Of The Time We Have Simply Forgotten, With No Consciousness Of Having Forgotten. In Individuals, The Phenomenon Is Called 'denial'; In Entire Cultures And Nations, It's Usually Called 'history.

My Belief Is That Art Should Not Be Comforting; For Comfort, We Have Mass Entertainment And One Another. Art Should Provoke, Disturb, Arouse Our Emotions, Expand Our Sympathies In Directions We May Not Anticipate And May Not Even Wish.

Obviously The Imagination Is Fueled By Emotions Beyond The Control Of The Conscious Mind.

If A Book I've Committed Myself To Review Turns Out To Be 'disappointing' I Make An Effort To Present It Objectively To The Reader, Including A Good Number Of Excerpts From The Text, So That The Reader Might Form His Or Her Own Opinion Independent Of My Own.

Blood Transforms The Warm Bath Water And, In It, I See Weakly That This Was A Mistake. The Razor's Cut Is Not Deep, Nevertheless The Blood Rushes Out Happily In The Warm Water As If Kin To It, The Same Tender Substance. Rising A New Person Transformed With An Icy Sense Of Error I Go To The Sink And Turn On Cold Water Which Is Not Friendly To Blood. The Cut Is Deeper Than Imagined.

To The West, The Pacific Ocean, Which Revulses Me, For Its Vastness Cannot Be Fitted Into Any Box.

I Work Very Slowly. It's Like Building A Ladder, Where You're Building Your Own Ladder Rung By Rung, And You're Climbing The Ladder. It's Not The Best Way To Build A Ladder, But I Don't Know Any Other Way.

Stories Come To Us As Wraiths Requiring Precise Embodiments.

From Mother You Will Inherit The Belief That You Can Journey To Your Fate, There's A Place To Be Located On A Map That's Destiny. If Only You Can Get There. If It Isn't Too Late. If No One Stops You.

One Of The Large Consolations For Experiencing Anything Unpleasant Is The Knowledge That One Can Communicate It.

One Of Life's Minor Satisfactions Is Forgetting.

I Am Inclined To Think That As I Grow Older I Will Come To Be Infatuated With The Art Of Revision, And There May Come A Time When I Will Dread Giving Up A Novel At All.

At A Time When Politics Deals In Distortions And Half Truths, Truth Is To Be Found In The Liberal Arts. There's Something Afoot In This Country And You Are Very Much A Part Of It.

There Is A Terrible Weight In All Kinds Of Beauty

A Lot Of Widows Feel That They Have Betrayed Their Spouse By Continuing To Live. It's Deranged Thinking. I Know That, But That Doesn't Stop You Feeling It.

It's Where We Go, And What We Do When We Get There, That Tells Us Who We Really Are.

Writing Is The Most Solitary Of Arts.

People Who Are Disenfranchised Politically And People Who Are Poor Often Don't Vote. They Often Don't Elect Politicians, So The Politicians Who Are Supporting Them Are Really Being Very Charitable, Because They're Not Going To Give Them Billions Of Dollars In Campaign Funds.

America Is A Very Religious Nation. Not A Mono-religious Nation Because There Are Many Different Strands Of Belief, But There's Something About This Nation That Inspires People, Or Perhaps Draws People, Who Are Strongly Idealistic.

I Turn Down Invitations To Do Things For Money. I Have Almost No Interest In Making Money. Actually, I've Acquired A Fair Amount Of Money That I Will Never Live To Spend. So Earning Money, In A Way, Depresses Me, Because I Feel It's Just Piling Up.

Loneliness Is Like Starvation: You Don't Realize How Hungry You Are Until You Begin To Eat.

And This Is The Forbidden Truth, The Unspeakable Taboo - That Evil Is Not Always Repellent But Frequently Attractive; That It Has The Power To Make Of Us Not Simply Victims, As Nature And Accident Do, But Active Accomplices.

Like All Virtuous People He Imagines He Must Speak The Truth.

I Don't Think I'm Morbid By Nature. Serious Writers Have Always Written About Serious Subjects. Lighthearted Material Doesn't Appeal To Me, And I Don't Read It. I Think I'm A Realist, With A Realistic Sensibility Of History And The Tragedy Of History.

Serious Subjects

She Wasn't In Love But She Would Love Him, If That Would Save Her.

If You Explore Beneath Shyness Or Party Chit-chat, You Can Sometimes Turn A Dull Exchange Into An Intriguing One. I've Found This To Be Particularly True In The Case Of Professors Or Intellectuals, Who Are Full Of Fascinating Information, But Need Encouragement Before They'll Divulge It.

Ultimately, We Measure Ourselves Against Our Own Ideas Of Idealism And Perfection, And We Don't Always Come Very Close To Them.

I Write So Much Because My Cat Sits On My Lap. She Purrs So I Don't Want To Get Up. She's So Much More Calming Than My Husband.

It's Very Hard To Be An Experimental Woman Writer. If I Had Been Writing Under A Pseudonym, Just Initials, I Might Have A Different Reputation - But, Then I Couldn't Be Myself Either.

The Innocence Of Such Children Doesn't Answer Our Deepest Questions About This Vale Of Tears To Which We Are Condemned, But It Helps To Dispel Them. That Is The Secret To Family Life.

To Be True To Life, A Novel Must Have An Ending That Is Inevitable Given The Specific Personalities Of The Characters Involved. The Novelist Must Not Impose An Ending Upon Them.

We Inhabit Ourselves Without Valuing Ourselves, Unable To See That Here, Now, This Very Moment Is Sacred; But Once It’s Gone – Its Value Is Incontestable.

My Students Often Say, "my Roommate Read This Story And Really Liked It", And It's Hard To Convince Them That There Are Things Wrong With It. I Say, "well, People Who Love You Want You To Be Happy. But I'm Your Professor And I'm Supposed To Be Teaching You Something."

For The Writer, The Serial Killer Is, Abstractly, An Analogue Of The Imagination's Caprices And Amorality; The Sense That, No Matter The Dictates And Even The Wishes Of The Conscious Social Self, The Life Or Will Or Purpose Of The Imagination Is Incomprehensible, Unpredictable.

How Does The Poet Transform His Banal Thoughts (are Not Most Thoughts Banal?) Into Such Stunning Forms, Into Beauty?

We Are Linked By Blood, And Blood Is Memory Without Language.

For Politics Is In Its Essence As Adams Had Said, The 'systematic Organization Of Hatred': Either You Were Organized Or You Were Not.

I Believe That Any Form Of Art Is A Species Of Exploration And Transgression. ... Art By Its Nature Is A Transgressive Act, And Artists Must Accept Being Punished For It. The More Original And Unsettling Their Art, The More Devastating The Punishment.

When Poets - Write About Food It Is Usually Celebratory. Food As The Thing-in-itself, But Also The Thoughtful Preparation Of Meals, The Serving Of Meals, Meals Communally Shared: A Sense Of The Sacred In The Profane.

I'm Sure All That You've Heard Is Just The Usual Gossip, Invented To Injure Feelings Rather Than Illuminate Truth.

This Is My Life Now. Absurd, But Unpredictable. Not Absurd Because Unpredictable But Unpredictable Because Absurd. If I Have Lost The Meaning Of My Life, I Might Still Find Small Treasured Things Among The Spilled And Pilfered Trash.

Not To Be Alone. To Be Spared The Possibility Of Knowing Oneself, In Aloneness.

Knowing Oneself

Why The Need, Rising In Some Very Nearly To The Level Of Compulsion, To Verify Experience By Way Of Language?-to Scrupulously Record And Preserve The Very Passing Of Time?

Read Widely, And Without Apology. Read What You Want To Read, Not What Someone Tells You You Should Read.

While There Are 'women Writers' There Are Not, And Have Never Been, 'men Writers.' This Is An Empty Category, A Class Without Specimens; For The Noun 'writer' - The Very Verb 'writing' - Always Implies Masculinity.

Writing Is A Consequence Of Having Been 'haunted' By Material. Why This Is, No One Knows.

There Was A Greek Philosopher Who Taught That, Of All Things, Not To Have Been Born Is The Sweetest State. But I Believe Sleep Is The Sweetest State. You're Dead, Yet Alive. There's No Sensation So Exquisite.

I Never Change, I Simply Become More Myself.

The Despairing Soul Is A Rebel.

How Lawyers Make Work For One Another! You're All Priests, Worshipping The Same God. No Wonder You Adore One Another.

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Sometimes I Stumble Upon A Wonderfully Irresistible To Me Voice, Unexpectedly.

We Are Stimulated To Emotional Response, Not By Works That Confirm Our Sense Of The World, But By Works That Challenge It.

Detroit, My 'great' Subject, Made Me The Person I Am, Consequently The Writer I Am - For Better Or Worse.

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Just As Our Historical Beginnings Are Utterly Mysterious-why Are We Born? Why When And As We Are?-so Too Are The Beginnings Of Works Of Art And Of "artists.

Most People Who Are Writers Go Through Periods When They Can't Write.

One Writes To Memorialize, And To Bring To Life Again That Which Has Been Lost.

The Other Book That I Worry No One Reads Anymore Is James Joyce's Ulysses. It's Not Easy, But Every Page Is Wonderful And Repays The Effort. I Started Reading It In High School, But I Wasn't Really Able To Grasp It. Then I Read It In College. I Once Spent Six Weeks In A Graduate Seminar Reading It. It Takes That Long. That's The Problem. No One Reads That Way Anymore. People May Spend A Week With A Book, But Not Six.

A Writer Can't Subtract Or Excise Any Of His/her Past Because Doing So Would Erase The Work Produced During That Time.

Anyone Who Teaches Knows That You Don't Really Experience A Text Until You've Taught It, In Loving Detail, With An Intelligent And Responsive Class.

I Think What Distresses Me Most In My Life Is That I Have So Many Ideas I Consider Exciting Ideas That I Will Never Live To Execute Because It Takes Me So Long To Execute.

I Don't Think That Any 'ism' Is Higher Than Literature Or Art. So I'm A Formalist. I Greatly Honor And Respect The Form Of A Work.

Honor And Respect

As A Teacher At Princeton, I'm Surrounded By People Who Work Hard So I Just Make Good Use Of My Time. And I Don't Really Think Of It As Work - Writing A Novel, In One Sense, Is A Problem-solving Exercise.

Where There Must Be A Choice, A Girl Will Choose Daddy. Even If You Are Mommy, You Concede That This Must Be So: You Remember When You Were A Girl, Too.

The Only People Who Claim That Money Is Not Important Are People Who Have Enough Money So That They Are Relieved Of The Ugly Burden Of Thinking About It.

When You Are Writing Literary Writing, You Are Communicating Something Subtextual With Emotions And Poetry. The Prose Has To Have A Voice; It's Not Just Typing. It Takes A While To Get That Voice.

Any Kind Of Creative Activity Is Likely To Be Stressful. The More Anxiety, The More You Feel That You Are Headed In The Right Direction. Easiness, Relaxation, Comfort - These Are Not Conditions That Usually Accompany Serious Work.

I'm Very American In The Sense Of Being An Explorer. America Is Filled With People Who Are Interested In Exploring Landscapes, Either External Or Internal. A Westward Nation Of Explorers.

The Best Revenge Is Living Well Without You.

[emily] Dickinson, Our Supreme Poet Of Inwardness.

You Need So Much Energy And Encouragement To Write That If Someone Says Something Negative, Some Of That Energy Goes.

Fame's Carapace Does Not Allow For Easy Breathing.

Your Punishment If You're A Woman. Not Loved Enough.

Can Compromise Be An Art? Yes--but A Minor Art.

And What Is 'art'? - A Firestorm Rushing Through Time, Arising From No Visible Source And Conforming To No Principles Of Logic Or Causality.

When I Complete A Novel I Set It Aside, And Begin Work On Short Stories, And Eventually Another Long Work. When I Complete That Novel I Return To The Earlier Novel And Rewrite Much Of It. In The Meantime The Second Novel Lies In A Desk Drawer.

But He Doesn't Love Her. I Invented That. It Is A Plot If You Imagine People In Love--the Lazy Looping Criss Crosses Of Love, Blows, Stares, Tears. No. It Doesn't Happen. No Love. People Meet, Touch, Stare Into One Another's Faces, Shake Their Heads Clear, Move On, Forget. It Doesn't Happen.

Without Craft, Art Remains Private. Without Art, Craft Is Merely Hackwork.

It Makes Me Angry Sometimes, It's A Visceral Thing--how You Come To Despise Your Own Words In Your Ears Not Because They Aren't Genuine, But Because They Are; Because You've Said Them So Many Times, Your 'principles,' Your 'ideals'--and So Damned Little In The World Has Changed Because Of Them.

The Greatest Realities Are Physical And Economic, All The Subtleties Of Life Come Afterward.

It Seems Disingenuous To Ask A Writer Why She, Or He, Is Writing About A Violent Subject When The World And History Are Filled With Violence.

I Think Whenever We Think Of Our Hometowns, We Tend To Think Of Very Specific People: With Whom You Rode On The School Bus, Who Was Your Next Door Neighbor You Were Playing With, Who Your Girlfriend Was. It's Always Something Very Specific.

The Music Was Always In The Background, Like Music At A Church Service; It Was Something To Depend Upon.

One Man's Insanity Is Another Man's Genius; Someday The World Will Recognize The Genius In My Insanity.

To Choose The Ideal Voice For A Character Is To Give A Character An Ardent And Vivid Life, To Allow Him Or Her To Speak, Rather Than Speaking For Them, In An Older Style Of Omniscient Narration.

The Novel Is Perhaps The Highest Art Form Because It So Closely Resembles Life: It Is About Human Relationships. It's Technique, Page By Page, Resembles Our Technique Of Living Day By Day-a Way Of Relating.

The Books I Read I Do Enjoy, Very Much; Otherwise I Wouldn't Read Them. Most Of Them Are For Review, For The New York Review Of Books, And Substantial.

The First Sentence Cant Be Written Until The Final Sentence Is Written.

Who Is To Blame For This Most Recent Of Sports Disgraces In America? The Culture That Flings Young Athletes Like Tyson Up Out Of Obscurity, Makes Millionaires Of Them And Watches Them Self-destruct?

The Punishment – To The Body, The Brain, The Spirit – A Man Must Endure To Become Even A Moderately Good Boxer Is Inconceivable To Most Of Us Whose Idea Of Personal Risk Is Largely Ego-related Or Emotional.

Boxing Has Become America's Tragic Theater.

To Love Life For Some Men Is To Love Fighting, For Fighting, And Not Love, Is Seen As Man's Deepest Passion.

What Does It Mean To Be Born? After We Die, Will It Be The Same Thing As It Was Before We Were Born? Or A Different Kind Of Nothingness? Because There Might Be Knowledge Then. Memory.

The Denial Of Language Is A Suicidal One And We Pay For It With Our Own Lives.

The Institution Of Marriage Is Just Formalizing An Emotion, An Attempt To Make It Seem Permanent. The Emotion Will Last Or It Won't Last; Nothing Can Guarantee It.

A Typical Biography Relying Upon Individuals' Notorious Memories And The Anecdotes They've Invented Contains A High Degree Of Fiction, Yet Is Considered 'nonfiction.'

Except That Awards Are Competitive, Which Is A Negative Thing, They Are Wonderful For Singling Out Deserving Individuals And Bringing Their Work To The Attention Of Many Potential Readers Who Might Otherwise Have Been Totally Unaware Of Them.

Sometimes I Read Reviews, And Without Exception I Will Read Critical Essays That Are Sent To Me. The Critical Essays Are Interesting On Their Own Terms.

I Had Forgotten That Time Wasn't Fixed Like Concrete But In Fact Was Fluid As Sand, Or Water. I Had Forgotten That Even Misery Can End.

The Joyous Fulfillment Of Your Sex : The Sacred Duties Of Beloved Wife, And Helpmeet, And Mother. In Opposition To The Vulgar And Mercantile Hurly-burly Of The Great World, The Idyllic Pleasures Of The Domestic Hearth-the Which, I Firmly Believe, Make Of One Small Room An Everywhere, Indeed; And Provide Us With That Small Measure Of Bliss, Which Is, If We Are Greatly Fortunate, And Deserving, Our Lord's Promise To Us, Of The Heaven To Come.

Only When Men Are Connected To Large, Universal Goals Are They Really Happy-and One Result Of Their Happiness Is A Rush Of Creative Activity.

Every Scar In My Face Is Worth It.

As A Child. I Grew Up On A Small Farm, So I Did A Lot Of Drawings Of Animals, Chickens And People. At The Bottom Of Every Page, I'd Put A Strange Scribble. I Was Emulating Adult Handwriting, Though I Didn't Actually Know How To Write.

...[i Am] Utterly Entranced, At Times, With The Mere Fact That There Are Other People, And That They Experience Themselves As The Primary Center Of Consciousness Just As I Do. That Fact Alone...well, That Fact Alone Is Staggering.

The Television Screen, So Unlike The Movie Screen, Sharply Reduced Human Beings, Revealed Them As Small, Trivial, Flat, In Two Banal Dimensions, Drained Of Color. Wasn't There Something Reassuring About It! -- That Human Beings Were In Fact Merely Images Of A Kind Registered In One Another's Eyes And Brains, Phenomena Composed Of Microscopic Flickering Dots Like Atoms. They Were Atoms -- Nothing More. A Quick Switch Of The Dial And They Disappeared And Who Could Lament The Loss?

Childhood Is The Province Of The Imagination And When I Immerse Myself In It, I Re-create It As It Was, As It Could Have Been, As I Wanted - And Didn't Want - It To Be.

There Is An Hour When You Realize: Here Is What You Have Been Given. More Than This, You Won't Receive. And What This Is, What Your Life Has Come To, Will Be Taken From You. In Time.

I've Always Been Interested In Writing About People, Including Young Children Who Are Not Able To Speak For Themselves. As In My Novel 'black Water,' I Provide A Voice For Someone Who Has Died And Can't Speak For Herself.

Writing! The Activity For Which The Only Adequate Bribe Is The Possibility Of Suicide, One Day.

You Don't Have To Understand Why Anything That Has Happened Nor Do You Even Have To Understand What It Is That Has Happened. You Have Only To Live With The Remains.

I Was Trying Not To Be Happy, Hopeful. I Did Not Believe I Deserved Happiness Or Even Hope, If You Knew My Soul.

You Cultivate The Subconscious By Meditation, By Sitting In Silence And By Not Trying To Control Your Thoughts. Then Go Someplace Where You Haven't Been Before, Or Go For A Walk, A Run, And Look For Signs Of Grace-an Epiphany, Something That Comes To You.

Never Be Ashamed Of Your Subject, And Of Your Passion For Your Subject.

On The Elusive Gift Of Blending Austerity Of Craft With Elasticity Of Allure.

Our House Is Made Of Glass... And Our Lives Are Made Of Glass; And There Is Nothing We Can Do To Protect Ourselves.

I Feel A Terrible Loss When I (eventually Must) Complete A Work Of Fiction.

You're An Insomniac, You Tell Yourself: There Are Profound Truths Revealed Only To The Insomniac By Night Like Those Phosphorescent Minerals Veined And Glimmering In The Dark But Coarse And Ordinary Otherwise; You Have To Examine Such Minerals In The Absence Of Light To Discover Their Beauty, You Tell Yourself.

Self-criticism Is An Art Not Many Are Qualified To Practice.

I Learned Long Ago That Being Lewis Carroll Was Infinitely More Exciting Than Being Alice.

Novels Begin, Not On The Page, But In Meditation And Day-dreaming - In Thinking, Not Writing.

Characters Begin As Voices, Then Gain Presence By Being Viewed In Others' Eyes. Characters Define One Another In Dramatic Contexts. It Is Often Very Exciting, When Characters Meet - Out Of Their Encounters, Unanticipated Stories Can Spring.

You Are Writing For Your Contemporaries - Not For Posterity. If You Are Lucky, Your Contemporaries Will Become Posterity.

There Is The Expectation That A Younger Generation Has The Opportunity To Redeem The Crimes And Failings Of Their Elders And Would Have The Strength And Idealism To Do So.

If I'm Writing, I'll Say Something Metaphorical Or Approximate, Whereas Scientists Are Very Precise.

My Role Models Were Childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, The Brontes.

The Great Happiness In Life In Creativity Belongs To Amateurs.

Great Happiness

Running! If There's Any Activity Happier, More Exhilarating, More Nourishing To The Imagination, I Can't Think Of What It Might Be.

... Such Speculation Is Like Staring Into The Hot White Sun. You Know The Sun Is There But You Can't See A Thing.

Of Course, Both [oscar] Wilde & [vladimir] Nabokov Believe In Many Things, And These Things Emerge In Their Writing Clearly - For Wilde, The Folly Of Humankind And The (romantic) Grandeur Of The Heroic, Lone Individual (not Unlike Wilde Himself); For Nabokov, The Possibility Of A Kind Of Transcendence Through A Great, Prevailing, Superior Sort Of Love (especially In Ada, The Most Self-congratulatory Of Novels.)

Her Visits To Her Former Hometown Were Infrequent And Often Painful. Pilgrimages Fueled By The Tepid Oxygen Of Family Duty, Unease, Guilt. The More Esther Loved Her Parents, The More Helpless She Felt, As They Aged, To Protect Them From Harm. A Moral Coward, She Kept Her Distance.

The Art Of Reading Hardly Differs From The Art Of Writing, In That Its Most Intense Pleasures And Pains Must Remains Private, And Cannot Be Communicated To Others.

Look At The World And See What's There. It's Very Beautiful. It's A Very Exciting But In Some Ways Treacherous World, And All This Goes Into The Writing.

Later, Her First Intense, Serious Love Affair, Yes Then She'd Lost Something More Tangible, If Undefinable: Her Heart? Her Independence? Her Control Of, Definition Of, Self? That First True Loss, The Furious Bafflement Of It. And Never Again Quite So Assured, Confident.

Boxing Is About Being Hit Rather More Than It Is About Hitting, Just As It Is About Feeling Pain, If Not Devastating Psychological Paralysis, More Than It Is About Winning.

Yet I Will Make You All Love Me And I Will Punish Myself To Spite Your Love.

Probably Nothing Serious Or Worthwhile Can Be Accomplished Without One's Willingness To Be Alone For Sustained Periods Of Time, Which Is Not To Say That One Must Live Alone, Obsessively.

Nothing Is Accidental In The Universe - This Is One Of My Laws Of Physics - Except The Entire Universe Itself, Which Is Pure Accident, Pure Divinity.

You Wake Up One Morning, Those Years Are Gone. There's A Comfort In This Fact Perhaps. I Want To Think That There Must Be Comfort In All Facts We Can't Alter.

A Man Will Reveal His True Self, Or So It Seems, On The Tennis Court.

It Feels Good, Honey, But It Isn't Love.

We Are All Regionalists In Our Origins, However 'universal' Our Themes And Characters, And Without Our Cherished Hometowns And Childhood Landscapes To Nourish Us, We Would Be Like Plants Set In Shallow Soil. Our Souls Must Take Root - Almost Literally.

Truths Are The Last Thing You Learn About Your Family. By The Time You Learn, You're No Longer Their Child.

I Rarely Write In My Own Voice Except In Book Reviews And Memoirs; Otherwise, I Am Writing In Mediated Voices, Modulated In Terms Of The Characters Whom The Voices Express.

'a Fair Maiden' Existed In Notes And Sketches For Perhaps A Year. When I Traveled, I Would Take Along With Me My Folder Of Notes - 'ideas For Stories.' Eventually, I Began To Write It And Wrote It Fairly Swiftly - In Perhaps Two Months Of Fairly Intense Writing And Rewriting. Most Of My Time Writing Is Really Re-writing.

The Challenge Is To Resist Circumstances. Any Idiot Can Be Happy In A Happy Place, But Moral Courage Is Required To Be Happy In A Hellhole.

And So You Must Grant To God What Is God And Not Try To Think Of What You Have Lost, For That Way Is Madness.

If I Try To Summon Back His Face, The Sound Of His Voice, And The Sensation In My Stomach Like A Key Turning In A Lock When He Touched Me, I Lose Everything.

Writing Allows For Fictitious Voices - The Voices Of Persons Unlike Myself - That Might Otherwise Be Muted.

Nothing Comes Of So Many Things, If You Have Patience.

Having Patience

. . . There Is A Wish In The Heart Of Mankind To Be Distracted And Confused. Truth Is But One Attraction, And Not Always The Most Powerful.

There Should Really Not Be Anything Gratuitous In A Work Of Art. Sometimes What Seems As If It's Gratuitous May Be A Passage In Which A Character Is Being Characterized So That The Reader Comes To Know Him Or Her Better.

The Body Can't Distinguish Between Cleansing And Punishing For The Body Is Ignorant, And Mute Besides.

I Suggest To My Students That They Write Under A Pseudonym For A Week. That Allows Young Men To Write As Women, And Women As Men. It Allows Them A Lot Of Freedom They Don't Have Ordinarily.

I Have Forced Myself To Begin Writing When I've Been Utterly Exhausted, When I've Felt My Soul As Thin As A Playing Card…and Somehow The Activity Of Writing Changes Everything.

To Be Jewish Is To Be Specifically Identified With A History. And If You're Not Aware Of That When You're A Child, The Whole Tradition Is Lost.

Like Most People, I Can Be Very Easily Hurt.

Alone, She Took Hot Baths And Sat Exhausted In The Steaming Water, Wondering At Her Perpetual Exhaustion. All That Winter She Noticed The Limp, Languid Weight Of Her Arms, Her Veins Bulging Slightly With The Pressure Of Her Extreme Weariness ... One Day In January She Drew A Razor Blade Lightly Across The Inside Of Her Arm, Near The Elbow, To See What Would Happen.

I Don't Know Whether I Am Different From Other People. Perhaps I Am. Perhaps No One Has A Personality, And People Are Inventing Themselves In The Context In Which They Find Themselves.

It's Always A Challenge To Discover The Most Effective First Sentence, And The Most Effective Final Sentence, In A Chapter For Instance, And In The Book As A Whole.

The Historical Woodrow Wilson Suffered From Numerous Complaints Which We Might Today Label As Psychosomatic. Yet, Wilson Did Have A Stroke As A Relatively Young Man Of 39 And Seemed Always To Be Ill. He Was 'high-strung' - Intensely Neurotic - Yet A Charismatic Personality Nonetheless.

For Some Reason, Voters Can Be Brainwashed, And They Vote Sometimes Against Their Own Best Interests, Let Alone Voting Against The Interests Of People Who Need Them, Like People Who Are Disenfranchised And People Who Are Poor And So Forth.

You People Who Have Survived Childhood Don't Remeber Any Longer What It Was Like. You Think Children Are Whole, Uncomplicated Creatures, And If You Split Them In Two With A Handy Axe There Would Be All One Substance Inside, Hard Candy. But It Isn't Hard Candy So Much As A Hopeless Seething Lava Of All Kinds Of Things, A Turmoil, A Mess. And Once The Child Starts Thinking About This Mess He Begins To Disintegrate As A Child And Turns Into Something Else--an Adult, An Animal.

I Could Never Take The Idea Of Religion Very Seriously.

The Ideal Art, The Noblest Of Art: Working With The Complexities Of Life, Refusing To Simplify, To "overcome" Doubt.

It's One Of Those Secrets That's Embarrassing To Acknowledge, But We Do Love Our Students.

Before I Undertake A Lengthy Project, I Have Usually Given Much Thought To It Over A Period Of Years. My Files Are Filled With Likely Subjects - Which Perhaps, One Day, I Will Develop.

Art Originates In Play - In Improvisation, Experiment, And Fantasy; It Remains Forever, In Its Deepest Instincts, Playful And Spontaneous, An Exercise Of The Imagination Analogous To The Exercising Of The Physical Body To No Purpose Other Than Ecstatic Release.

I Don't Know What Marriages Are Like In General, But There Are Many Things Which I Don't Talk About With My Husband. We Discuss Practical Problems, But I Wouldn't Sit Down With Him And Talk About The Distant Past. It's Somewhat In Contrast To Other Americans, Who Feel That They Have To Confess Things, But I'm Really Not Like That.

See, People Come Into Your Life For A Reason. They Might Not Know It Themselves, Why. You Might Not Know It. But There's A Reason. There Has To Be

I've Never Given Up. I've Always Kept Going. I Don't Feel That I Could Afford To Give Up. That Would Be The Beginning Of The End.

For What Is Delusion But The Prelude To Hurt. And What Is Hurt But The Prelude To Rage.

Getting The First Draft Finished Is Like Pushing A Peanut With Your Nose Across A Very Dirty Floor.

Don't Try To Anticipate An Ideal Reader - Or Any Reader. He/she Might Exist - But Is Reading Someone Else.

I Come From People Who Did Not Go To College. They Didn't Even Finish High School. People Who One Might Call Ordinary Americans Who Are Very Hardworking.

Like A Flame Is Real Enough, Isn't It, While It's Burning?-even If There's A Time It Goes Out?

Acting Is The Loneliest Profession I Know.

I Have So Many Favorite Writers, It's Very Hard To Select A Few... Of Classic Writers, I Have Always Admired Emily Dickinson And Henry David Thoreau.

My Grandmother Could Never Have Written A Memoir, So 'the Gravedigger's Daughter' Is A Homage To Her Life, And To The Lives Of Other Young Women Of Her Generation, Which Are So Rarely Articulated.

Only When You Have Completed A Novel, Or A Story, Can You Return To The Beginning And Revise Or Rewrite.

Because The Meaning Of A Story Does Not Lie On Its Surface, Visible And Self-defining, Does Not Mean That Meaning Does Not Exist. Indeed, The Ambiguity Of Meaning, Its Inner Private Quality, May Well Be Part Of The Writer's Vision.

Much Of My Writing Is Energized By Unresolved Memories - Something Like Ghosts In The Psychological Sense.

I Read Books. Avidly, Ardently! As If My Life Depended Upon It.

When One Crosses Over From An Activity, Or The Verb, Of Writing Or Doing, And Becomes A Noun, Like "a Writer" I Think That Is An Act Of Supreme Self-consciousness That I've Never, In Effect, Made. I Write, But I Don't Like To Think Of Myself As A Writer. I Think It's Somewhat Self-aggrandizing And Pretentious. Now, I Am A Teacher.

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