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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.

-Joyce Carol Oates

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As A Child. I

Joyce Carol Oates

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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.

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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

The Worst Thing: To Give Yourself Away In Exchange For Not Enough Love.

Unrequited Love

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.

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.

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

Fame's Carapace Does Not Allow For Easy Breathing.

Whoever's Reading This, If Anyone Is Reading It: Does It Matter That Our Old Selves Are Lost To Us As Surely As The Past Is Lost, Or Is It Enough To Know Yes We Lived Then, And We Are Living Now, And The Connection Must Be There? Like A River Hundreds Of Miles Long Exists Both At Its Source And At Its Mouth, Simultaneously?

Writing Is The Most Solitary Of Arts.

Stories Come To Us As Wraiths Requiring Precise Embodiments.

And That's The Insult Of It, How Always It Comes Back To A Woman Being A "good" Mother In The World's Eyes Or A "bad" Mother, How Everything In A Woman's Life Is Funneled Through Her Body Between Her Legs.

In Families There Are Frequently Matters Of Which No One Speaks, Nor Even Alludes. There Are No Words For These Matters. As The Binding Skeleton Beneath The Flesh Is Never Acknowledged By Us And, When At Last It Defines Itself, Is After All An Obscenity.

I Don't Feel I Write Fast. I Write In Longhand And Do So Much Revision. On The Page, It's So Old-fashioned. I Could Write A Whole Novel On Scrap Paper, Scribbles And Things. I Keep Looking At It And Something Develops. For Me, Using A Word Processor Would Mean Staring At A Screen For Too Many Hours.

Our Enemy Is By Tradition Our Savior, In Preventing Us From Superficiality.

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.

It Is Only Through Disruptions And Confusion That We Grow, Jarred Out Of Ourselves By The Collision Of Someone Else's Private World With Our Own.

If You're Living With A Scientist, You See The World Differently Than You Do With A Humanist. It's In Some Ways Very Subtle, The Differences In Perceiving Reality.

Yes, 'black Girl/white Girl' Might Be Described As A 'coming-of-age' Novel, At Least For The Survivor Genna. It Is Also Intended As A Comment On Race Relations In America More Generally: We Are 'roommates' With One Another, But How Well Do We Know One Another?

Critics Sometimes Appear To Be Addressing Themselves To Works Other Than Those I Remember Writing.

Impossible Not To Imagine The Dead Observing Us. Our Love For Them A Soft, Shimmering Gossamar That Trails Behind Us.

The Heavenly Light You Admire Is Fossil-light, It's The Unfathomably Distant Past You Gaze Into, Stars Long Extinct

Betrayal Is The Deepest Wound. Betrayal Is What Remains Of Love, When Love Has Gone.

Criticism Is, For Me, Like Essay Writing, A Wonderful Way Of Relaxation; It Doesn't Require A Heightened And Mediated Voice, Like Prose Fiction, But Rather A Calm, Rational, Even Conversational Voice.

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

Having Patience

I Can't Imagine A Mental Life, A Spiritual Existence, Not Inextricably Bound Up With Language Of A Formal, Mediated Nature. Telling Stories, Choosing An Appropriate Language With Which To Tell The Story: This Seems To Me Quintessentially Human, One Of The Great Adventures Of Our Species.

Evil Isn't A Cosmological Riddle, Only Just Selfish Human Behavior.

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.

Strange: How When A Light Is Extinguished, It's Immediately As If It Has Never Been. Darkness Fills In Again, Complete.

Yet The Fact Had No Consciousness Of Itself Except Through Me.

People Have Libraries At Home, They Have Bookshelves, They Have Cds. And They Sort Of Try, People Try To Bring Great Artists Into Their Lives, Into Their Physical Houses And Sort Of Live With Portions Of Them. But They're Not Really Deeply Engaging With Them.

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.

When I'm Really Involved Or Getting Towards The End Of A Novel, I Can Write For Up To Ten Hours A Day. At Those Times, It's As Though I'm Writing A Letter To Someone I'm Desperately In Love With.

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.

Society Is The Picnic Certain Individuals Leave Early, The Party They Fail To Enjoy, The Musical Comedy They Find Not Worth The Price Of Admission.

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.

I Could Eat Your Heart & Asshole You'd Never Know It.

When I Was Very Little, Four Or Five, I Did Comic Strip Drawings, So My First Novel Had No Words. I Couldn't Write And Thought Adult Handwriting Was A Mysterious Scribble. When I Was 14, My Grandmother Gave Me A Typewriter And I Started Writing In A Different Way.

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

I Am More Or Less Reading All The Time.

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.

The Best Revenge Is Living Well Without You.

A Lawyer Is Basically A Mouth, Like A Shark Is A Mouth Attached To A Long Gut. The Business Of Lawyers Is To Talk, To Interrupt One Another, And To Devour Each Other If Possible.

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.

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

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.

I Don't Read For Amusement, I Read For Enlightenment. I Do A Lot Of Reviewing, So I Have A Steady Assignment Of Reading. I'm Also A Judge For The Anisfield-wolf Book Awards, Which Gives Awards To Literature And Nonfiction.

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

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

I Believe That The Creative Impulse Is Natural In All Human Beings, And That It Is Particularly Powerful In Children Unless It Is Suppressed. Consequently, One Is Behaving Normally And Instinctively And Healthily When One Is Creating - Literature, Art, Music, Or Whatever. An Excellent Cook Is Also Creative! I Am Disturbed That A Natural Human Inclination [creative Work] Should, By Some Freudian Turn Of Phrase, Be Considered Compulsive - Perhaps Even Pathological. To Me This Is A Complete Misreading Of The Human Enterprise. One Should Also Enjoy One's Work, And Look Forward To It Daily.

I Always Rewrite The Very Beginning Of A Novel. I Rewrite The Beginning As I Write The Ending, So I May Spend Part Of Morning Writing The Ending, The Last 100 Pages Approximately, And Then Part Of The Morning Revising The Beginning. So The Style Of The Novel Has A Consistency.

Before You Can Write A Novel You Have To Have A Number Of Ideas That Come Together. One Idea Is Not Enough.

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.

This Was Before Voice Mail, Recorded Phone Messages You Can't Escape. Life Was Easier Then. You Just Didn't Pick Up The Phone.

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.

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

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.

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.

Only In Love Is There Trust - Even The Possibility Of Trust.

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.

Loneliness Is Dangerous ... Because If Aloneness Does Not Lead To God, It Leads To The Devil. It Leads To The Self.

I Want To Tell You That I Love You I Want To Tell You That I Love You I Want To Tell You That I Love I Love I Love I Love But You Do Not.

'the Accursed' Is Very Much A Novel About Social Injustice As The Consequence Of The Terrible, Tragic Division Of Classes - The Exploitation Not Only Of Poor And Immigrant Workers But Of Their Young Children In Factories And Mills - And As The Consequence Of Race Hatred In The Aftermath Of The Civil War And The Freeing Of The Slaves.

A Mouth Of No Distinction But Well Practiced, Before I Entered My Teens, In Irony. For What Is Irony But The Repository Of Hurt? And What Is Hurt But The Repository Of Hope?

For What Are The Words With Which To Summarize A Lifetime, So Much Crowded Confused Happiness Terminated By Such Stark Slow-motion Pain?

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.

Boxing Is An American Sport - A 'so-called Sport' To Many - In Which Images Of Incalculable Beauty And Violence, Desperation And Ingenuity, Are Routinely Entwined; The Sport That Evokes The Most Extreme Reactions - Loathing, Revulsion, Righteous Indigation; A Fierce And Often Inexplicable Loyalty.

Of The Widow's Countless Death-duties There Is Really Just One That Matters: On The First Anniversary Of Her Husband's Death The Widow Should Think I Kept Myself Alive.

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

The American Dream Is A Multi-metaphor Made Up Of Distinct Regions. Many Regions Of This Country Are Almost Like Different Countries. Even In One State, Northern And Southern California Are Like Two Separate Countries.

I Wrote A Novel Called "blonde," Which Is About Norma Jean Baker, Who Becomes Marilyn Monroe, Which I Called A Fictitious Biography. That Uses The Material As If It Were Myth - That Marilyn Monroe Is Like This Mythical Figure In Our Culture.

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

The Appeal Of Writing Is Primarily The Investigation Of Mystery.

I Haven't Any Formal Schedule, But I Love To Write In The Morning, Before Breakfast. Sometimes The Writing Goes So Smoothly That I Don't Take A Break For Many Hours - And Consequently Have Breakfast At Two Or Three In The Afternoon On Good Days.

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

Insomniac Is An Impassioned Work-an Inspired Amalgam Of Academic And First-hand Research, Memoir, Analysis, And The Kind Of Obsessive Brooding We Associate With The Insomniac State. Much Here Is Fascinating, And Much Is Upsetting; Here Is A Cri De Coeur From A Lifetime Insomniac That Is Sure To Appeal To The Vast Army Of Fellow Insomniacs The World Over.

Writing Is A Solitary Occupation, And One Of Its Hazards Is Loneliness. But An Advantage Of Loneliness Is Privacy, Autonomy And Freedom.

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

She Thought That This Man Was Her Savior, That He Had Come To Her At A Time In Her Life When Her Life Demanded Completion, An End, A Permanent Fixing Of All That Was Troubled And Shifting And Deadly. And Yet It Was Absurd To Think This. No Person Could Save Another. So She Drew Back From Him And Released Him.

Love Is An Indescribable Sensation - Perhaps A Conviction, A Sense Of Certitude.

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."

Honorary Degrees And Lifetime Achievement Awards Are Very Encouraging. I Know That It Might Sound Strange That A Writer Who Has Published Many Books Still Needs Encouragement, But This Is True.

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?

I Have Beliefs, Of Course, Like Everyone-but I Don't Always Believe In Them.

My First Love Was Reading, Which Inspired Me To Write.

No, The Thing Is, We All Love Storytelling, And As A Writer You Get To Tell Stories All The Time.

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

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

Beauty Is A Question Of Optics. All Sight Is Illusion.

Obviously, There Is Pleasure In The Execution Of Any Sort Of Art, And Using Language, As Nabokov Felt Also, Is An Exquisite Process.

It's Not Hard To Write Poorly. But To Write Something Good, It Has To Be Revised.

Yes, I've Listened To Just A Few Audiobooks - But Hope To Listen To More. I've Wanted To Investigate How My Own Books Sound In This Format And Find The Experience Of Listening, And Not Reading, Quite Fascinating.

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

Knowing Oneself

I Feel Akin To [william] Shakespeare In The Sense That, As I See It, He Lived To Dramatize The Unfailingly Exciting, Unfathomably Strange Interplay Among Human Beings That Constitutes "scenes" In His Plays, And Constitutes "story" In Prose Fiction.

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.

Be Your Own Editor/critic. Sympathetic But Merciless!

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

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.

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.

A Good, Sympathetic Review Is Always A Wonderful Surprise.

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

One Of The Qualities Of Writing That Is Not Much Stressed Is Its Problem-solving Aspect, Having To Do With The Presentation Of Material: How To Structure It, What Sort Of Sentences (direct, Elliptical, Simple Or Compound, Syntactically Elaborate), What Tone (in Art, "tone" Is Everything), Pacing. Paragraphing Is A Way Of Dramatization, As The Look Of A Poem On A Page Is Dramatic; Where To Break Lines, Where To End Sentences.

The Greatest Works Of Literature Seem To Embody Both "art" And "morality".

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

I Would Suggest The Widow Do Things The Husband Used To Do, So He Seems To Be There With You. You Will Feel Like Just Going To Bed. It's So Wonderful, Going To Bed.

Her Wish To Die Was As Pervasive As A Dial Tone: You Lift The Receiver, It's Always There.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Ideas Brush Past Fleeting And Insubstantial As Moths. But I Let Them Go, I Don't Want Them. What I Want Is A Voice.

Most People Think That A Widow Is Inhabiting Some Elegiac World Of - It's Like Mozart's 'requiem Mass.' You Know, It's Very Beautiful And Elevated Thoughts And Some Measure Of Dignity. I Didn't Have That Experience At All. I Had One Pratfall After Another.

The Written Word, Obviously, Is Very Inward, And When We're Reading, We're Thinking. It's A Sort Of Spiritual, Meditative Activity. When We're Looking At Visual Objects, I Think Our Eyes Are Obviously Directed Outward, So There's Not As Much Reflective Time. And It's The Reflectiveness And The Spiritual Inwardness About Reading That Appeals To Me.

How Fascinating To A Child Are Words: The Shapes, Sounds, Textures And Mysterious Meanings Of Words; The Way Words Link Together Into Elastic Patterns Called "sentences." And These Sentences Into Paragraphs, And Beyond.

Princeton Is Quite Integrated. Women Are Professors At Princeton. Women Are Students At Princeton. That Began In The 1970s.

Even If I Seemed To Remember, I Could Not Know. For Just To Remember Something Is Not To Know If It Really Happened. That Is A Primary Fact Of The Inner Life, The Most Difficult Fact With Which We Must Live.

Remember Something

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.

My Own Way Of Writing Is Very Meditated And, Despite My Reputation, Rather Slow-moving. So I Do Spend A Good Deal Of Time Contemplating Endings. The Final Ending Is Usually Arrived At Simply By Intuition.

It's Impossible To Read A Distinctive Stylist Like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - And Many More - Without Wanting To Write, However Entirely Different One's Writing Will Be.

My Parents Inspired Me By Their Example. They Both Grew Up In The Depression, And Both Of Them Had To Quit School When They Were Quite Young To Work, Because There Actually Was No Choice. So They've Always Impressed Me With Their Resilience, Their Good Spirits, Their Courage. I Just Remember Them Carrying On And Just Doing Their Lives. They Really Made A Strong Impression On Me.

Early Publication Can Be A Dubious Blessing: We All Know Writers Who Would Give Anything Not To Have Published Their First Book, And Go About Trying To Buy Up All Existing Copies.

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

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.

To Be Knocked Out Doesn't Mean What It Seems. A Boxer Does Not Have To Get Up.

Not What The Mind Sees, But What The Mind Imagines The Eye Must See.

I Can't Say I Was A Very Successful Sorority Girl.

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 Cleaning Is Something I Use As A Reward If I Get Some Work Done. I Go Into A Very Happy State Of Mind When I'm Vacuuming.

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.

In A Family, What Isn't Spoken Is What You Listen For. But The Noise Of A Family Is To Drown It Out.

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.

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

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.

When People Say There Is Too Much Violence In My Books, What They Are Saying Is There Is Too Much Reality In Life.

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

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

What You Call Your Personality, You Know? --it's Not Like Actual Bones, Or Teeth, Something Solid. It's More Like A Flame. A Flame Can Be Upright, And A Flame Can Flicker In The Wind, A Flame Can Be Extinguished So There's No Sign Of It, Like It Had Never Been.

My Nature Is Orderly And Observant And Scrupulous And Deeply Introverted.

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

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.

Much In Our Lives Is Chance.

If Shakespeare's Great Plays Are Variants Of Stories, Even Novels, You Can See How Each Character Is Telling His Story From His Perspective; Each Is Vying With The Others For Dominance, But In The End, In Tragedy, Most Of These Voices Will Die, To Be Replaced By The Yet More Vigorous Voice Of A Younger Generation.

An Actress Wants To Be Seen. An Actress Wants To Be Loved. By Multitudes Of People, Not Just One Lone Man.

Love Commingled With Hate Is More Powerful Than Love. Or Hate.

Keep A Light, Hopeful Heart. But expect The Worst.

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.

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.

When I Wrote 'we Were The Mulvaneys,' I Was Just Old Enough To Look Back Upon My Own Family Life And The Lies Of Certain Individuals Close To Me, With The Detachment Of Time. I Wanted To Tell The Truth About Secrets: How Much Pain They Give, Yet How Much Relief, Even Happiness We May Feel When At Last The Motive For Secrecy Has Passed.

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

For Obviously The Advantage For Most Writers Is That No One Sees Them. The Writer Is Invisible, Which Confers Power.

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.

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

Even As A Young Child, I Was A Lover Of Books And Of The Spaces In Which, As Indeed In A Sacred Temple, Books Might Safely Reside.

Tragedy Is The Highest Form Of Art.

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.

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

To Claim - To Claim Repeatedly - That You Are Innocent Of What It Is Claimed By Others That You Have Done, Or Might Have Done, Or Are In Some Quarters Strongly Suspected Of Having Done, Is Never Enough Unless Others, Numerous Others, Will Say It For You.

Henry James's Later Works Would Have Been Better Had He Resisted That Curious Sort Of Self-indulgence, Dictating To A Secretary. The Roaming Garrulousness Of Ordinary Speech Is Usually Corrected When It's Transcribed Into Written Prose.

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.

Running! If There's Any Activity Happier, More Exhilarating, More Nourishing To The Imagination, I Can't Think What It Might Be. In Running The Mind Flies With The Body; The Mysterious Efflorescence Of Language Seems To Pulse In The Brain, In Rhythm With Our Feet And The Swinging Of Our Arms.

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?

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.

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

The Novel Is The Affliction For Which Only The Novel Is The Cure.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Third Man In The Ring Makes Boxing Possible.

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.

"politics" Per Se Is Absent From My Writing But There Is Usually A Moral (if Ironic) Compass.

Paradox: How Do We Know What We Have Failed To See Because We Have No Language To Express It, Thus We Cannot Know That We Have Failed To See It.

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.

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.

It Would Be Difficult For A Writer Of Realism To Avoid Suggesting A Political/moral Perspective In His Or Her Fiction. "politics" Per Se Is Absent From My Writing But There Is Usually A Moral (if Ironic) Compass.

Productivity Is A Relative Matter. And It's Really Insignificant: What Is Ultimately Important Is A Writer's Strongest Books.

The Folly Of War Is That It Can Have No Natural End Except In The Extinction An Entire People.

Art Does The Same Things Dreams Do. We Have A Hunger For Dreams And Art Fulfills That Hunger. So Much Of Real Life Is A Disappointment. That's Why We Have Art.

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.

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

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

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.

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

As Soon As I Moved To Princeton In 1978, I Became Fascinated By Local History, Much Of It Revolutionary War-era; And I Became Fascinated By The Presidency Of Woodrow Wilson At Princeton University.

Princeton University

For The First Time Driving That Day I Could Feel The Motion Of The Earth. The Earth Rushing Through The Emptiness Of Space. Spinning On Its Axis But They Say You Don't Feel It, You Can't Experience It. But To Feel It Is To Be Scared And Happy At Once And To Know That Nothing Matters But That You Do What You Want To Do And What You Do You Are. And I Knew I Was Moving Into The Future. There Is Not Past Anybody Can Get To, To Alter Things Or Ever To Know What Those Things Were But There Is Definitely A Future, We Are Already In It.

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

...failure Is A Human Condition, Not Victory Over Odds; For Each Hellen Keller Who Triumphs, There Are Tens Of Millions Who Fail, Mute And Deaf And Insensate As Vegetables Tossed Upon A Vast Garbage Pile To Rot.

Boxing Is Rough. Even If You Win, You Get Hurt.

That's How A Thing Starts Out Real Then Ends Up Just An Idea.

Death Is Just The Last Scene Of The Last Act.

In Love There Are Two Things - Bodies And Words.

Novels Usually Evolve Out Of 'character.' Characters Generate Stories, And The Shape Of A Novel Is Entirely Imagined But Should Have An Aesthetic Coherence.

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 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.

Art Is A Means Of Memorialization Of The Past, A Record Of A Rapidly Vanishing World; A Means Of Exorcising, At Least Temporarily, The Ravages Of Homesickness. To Speak Of 'what Is Past, Or Passing Or To Come'-in The Most Meticulous Language Thereby To Assure Its Permanence; To Honor Those We've Loved And Learned From And Must Outlive.

Any Writer Who Has Difficulty In Writing Is Probably Not Onto His True Subject, But Wasting Time With False, Petty Goals; As Soon As You Connect With Your True Subject You Will Write.

Productivity Is A Relative Matter. And It's Really Insignificant: What Is Ultimately Important Is A Writer's Strongest Books. It May Be The Case That We All Must Write Many Books In Order To Achieve A Few Lasting Ones - Just As A Young Writer Or Poet Might Have To Write Hundreds Of Poems Before Writing His First Significant One.

There Is A Terrible Weight In All Kinds Of Beauty

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.

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?

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