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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.

-Joyce Carol Oates

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As A Teacher At

Joyce Carol Oates

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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.

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More From Joyce Carol Oates

Primarily, 'black Girl/white Girl' Is The Story Of Two Very Different, Yet Somehow 'fated' Girls; For Genna, Her 'friendship' With Minette Is The Most Haunting Of Her Life, Though It Is One-sided And Ends In Tragedy.

I Love Insult, It's Always Honest.

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

There Is An Hour, A Minute - You Will Remember It Forever - When You Know Instinctively On The Basis Of The Most Inconsequential Evidence, That Something Is Wrong. You Don't Know - Can't Know - That It Is The First Of A Series Of "wrongful" Events That Will Culminate In The Utter Devastation Of Your Life As You Have Known It.

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.

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.

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

Homo Sapiens Is The Species That Invents Symbols In Which To Invest Passion And Authority, Then Forgets That Symbols Are Inventions.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Every Scar In My Face Is Worth It.

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

When Writing Goes Painfully, When It’s Hideously Difficult, And One Feels Real Despair (ah, The Despair, Silly As It Is, Is Real!)–then Naturally One Ought To Continue With The Work; It Would Be Cowardly To Retreat. But When Writing Goes Smoothly–why Then One Certainly Should Keep On Working, Since It Would Be Stupid To Stop. Consequently One Is Always Writing Or Should Be Writing.

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.

I Could Never Take The Idea Of Religion Very Seriously.

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

Budapest In Late May Is A City Of Lilacs. The Sweet, Languid, Rather Sleepy Smell Of Lilacs Wafts Everywhere. And It Is A City Of Lovers, Many Of Them Quite Middle-aged. Walking With Their Arms Around Each Other, Embracing And Kissing On Park Benches. A Sensuousness Very Much Bound Up (it Seems To Me) With The Heady Ubiquitous Smell Of Lilacs.

Cherie, Keep Walking. Shut Your Eyes. We Are Headed For The Bridge. We Are Going To Cross It.

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.

I Never Change, I Simply Become More Myself.

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.

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

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 Despairing Soul Is A Rebel.

The Appeal Of Writing Is Primarily The Investigation Of Mystery.

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

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.

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

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

Boxing Is A Celebration Of The Lost Religion Of Masculinity All The More Trenchant For Its Being Lost.

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?

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

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

I Am Not Conscious Of Working Especially Hard, Or Of 'working' At All. Writing And Teaching Have Always Been, For Me, So Richly Rewarding That I Don't Think Of Them As Work In The Usual Sense Of The Word.

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

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

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

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.

When My Brother Called To Inform Me, On The Morning Of May 22, 2003, That Our Mother Caroline Oates Had Died Suddenly Of A Stroke, It Was A Shock From Which, In A Way, I Have Yet To Recover.

The Worst Cynicism: A Belief In Luck.

Among Many Of My Friends And Acquaintances, I Seem To Be One Of The Very Few Individuals Who Felt Or Feels No Ambivalence About My Mother. All My Feelings For My Mother Were Positive, Very Strong And Abiding.

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

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.

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.

Boxing Has Become America's Tragic Theater.

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

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 Don't Teach Literature From My Perspective As 'joyce Carol Oates.' I Try To Teach Fiction From The Perspective Of Each Writer. If I'm Teaching A Story By Hemingway, My Endeavor Is To Present The Story That Hemingway Wrote In Its Fullest Realization.

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

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

Vividly Imagined, Beautifully Written, At Times Almost Unbearably Suspenseful-the Stories In Kristiana Kahakauwila's Debut Collection, This Is Paradise, Are Boldly Inventive In Their Exploration Of The Tenuous Nature Of Human Relations. These Are Poignant Stories Of 'paradise'-hawai'i-with All That 'paradise' Entails Of The Transience Of Sensuous Beauty.

A Writer Who Has Published As Many Books As I Have Has Developed, Of Necessity, A Hide Like A Rhino's, While Inside There Dwells A Frail, Hopeful Butterfly Of A Spirit.

I See The World In Ways That Might Be Considered Somewhat Harsh And Darwinistic. At The Same Time Mediated, As In Darwin, By A Real Idealism And An Excitement About The Possibilities Of The Intellect And Imagination To Deal With This Somewhat Brutal World.

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.

Near The Point Of Impact, Time Acelerates To The Speed Of Light.

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

Acting Is The Loneliest Profession I Know.

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.

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

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

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

Language Is The Instrument In All Cases And Can Language Be Trusted?if It Were Not For Language, Could We Lie?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Art Is The Highest Expression Of The Human Spirit.

I Remember Once Asking Grandma About A Book She Was Reading, A Biography Of Abraham Lincoln, And How She Answered Me: This Was The First Conversation Of My Life That Concerned A Book, And 'the Life Of The Mind' - And Now, Such Subjects Have Become My Life.

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.

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.

[emily] Dickinson, Our Supreme Poet Of Inwardness.

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

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.

A Daydreamer Is Prepared For Most Things.

There Is Something Thrilling In The Mimesis Of Life's Surprising Unfolding.

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

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.

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.

I Think It's Very Important For Writers And Artists Generally To Be Witnesses To The World, And To Be Transparent. To Let Other People Speak... To Travel... To Experience The World. And Memorialize It.

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

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 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

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

The Danger Of Motherhood. You Relive Your Early Self, Through The Eyes Of Your Mother.

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

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

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 Compose Most Of My Tweets With Care, As If They Were Aphorisms - They Are Not Usually Dashed-off. Sometimes I'm Surprised By The High, Poetic Quality Of Twitter - It Lends Itself To A Surreal Sort Of Self-expression.

Celebrate While You Can

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.

How Mysterious It Is, To Be In Love. For You Can Be In Love With One Who Knows Nothing Of You. Perhpas Our Greatest Happinesses Spring From Such Longings-being In Love With One Who Is Oblivious Of You.

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.

The Suicide Does Not Play The Game, Does Not Observe The Rules. He Leaves The Party Too Soon, And Leaves The Other Guests Painfully Uncomfortable.

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

I Never Really Knew I Wanted To 'be' A Writer, But I Was Always Writing From A Very Young Age. It Became More Conscious As An Ideal When I Was In My Twenties.

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.

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.

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.

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

Why Is Humanism Not The Preeminent Belief Of Humankind?

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.

Often In Gothic Novels There's A Large House, An Estate, And It's Symbolic Of That Culture. Usually It's Sort Of Moldering Or Rotted Or Something, And Sometimes It's A Whole Community.

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

Fame's Carapace Does Not Allow For Easy Breathing.

When A Marriage Ends, Who Is Left To Understand It?

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.

In Love There Are Two Things - Bodies And Words.

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

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

After My Husband Died, I Could Not Write Much - I Could Not Concentrate. I Was Too Exhausted Most Of The Time Even To Contemplate Writing. But I Did Take Notes - Not For Fiction, But For A Journal, Or Diary, Of This Terrible Time. I Did Not Think That I Would Ever Survive This Interlude.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Long Ago I'd Said That I Am "fascinated By The Phantasmagoria Of Human Personality" - This Is Perhaps Even Truer Now Than Years Ago.

There Is A Terrible Weight In All Kinds Of Beauty

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

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.

What Madness! Yet She Would Do It, If She Could Force Herself. She'd Become, She Believed, A Stronger Person: A Willful, Resolute. Like The Man Who Adored Her, Reckless.

I Am More Or Less Reading All The Time.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

There Are Boxers Possessed Of Such Remarkable Intuition, Such Uncanny Prescience, One Would Think They Were Somehow Recalling Their Fights, Not Fighting Them As We Watch.

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.

Henry David Thoreau Is Very Independent-minded, Very Iconoclastic, And Had Quite A Corrosive Sense Of Humor. I Think That I Probably Have Grown Up To Have A Thoreauvian Perspective On Many Things. Though In Other Ways I Live A Life He Would Not Have Approved Of. He Believed To Simplify, Simplify, Simplify. Make Your Life Very Clear And Plain And Meditative And Not Confused. Sometimes My Life, In Fact, Is Confused.

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

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.

Very Few Writers Of Distinction In Fact Were Outstanding As Undergraduates.

I Used To Think Getting Old Was About Vanity But Actually It's About Losing People You Love.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

Perhaps The Inevitable Tragedy Of Our Complex Civilization Is That We Must Be Specialists In Our Fields - And Our Fields Have Become Increasingly Difficult, So That Communication Is Nearly Impossible.

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

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.

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

The Secret Of Being A Writer: Not To Expect Others To Value What You've Done As You Value It. Not To Expect Anyone Else To Perceive In It The Emotions You Have Invested In It. Once This Is Understood, All Will Be Well.

Each Genre Exerts A Considerable Spell, As A Kind Of "form" To Be Filled, As A Shakespearean Sonnet Is Filled.

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

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 Write In Longhand And Assemble Lots Of Notes, And Then I Try To Collate Them Into A Coherent Chronology. It's Like Groping Along In The Dark. I Like Writing And Find It Challenging, But I Don't Find It Easy.

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

I Always Tell My Students The Same Thing. And That's To Live Life, And To Read Very Voraciously Without Any Definite Program. To Travel, To Meet People, To Talk To People, To Listen Very Carefully, And Not Interrupt, But Listen To Their Own Grandparents Speak Of Their Families.

Prose-it Might Be Speculated-is Discourse; Poetry Ellipsis. Prose Is Spoken Aloud; Poetry Overheard.

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 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.

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.

There Is Nothing "ordinary" About Reality.

I Tend To Think In Dramatic Terms. In Life, There May Be An Actual Drama, But It Would Be The Fictionalized, Imagined Drama That Engaged Me.

I Haven't The Faintest Idea What My Royalties Are. I Haven't The Faintest Idea How Many Copies Of Books Sold, Or How Many Books That I've Written. I Could Look These Things Up; I Have No Interest In Them. I Don't Know How Much Money I Have. There Are A Lot Of Things I Just Don't Care About.

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.

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.

It's A Taboo Subject. How The Dead Are Betrayed By The Living. We Who Are Living--we Who Have Survived--understand That Our Guilt Is What Links Us To The Dead. At All Times We Can Hear Them Calling To Us, A Growing Incredulity In Their Voices, You Will Not Forget Me -- Will You? How Can You Forget Me? I Have No One But You.

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.

The Brain Is A Muscle Of Busy Hills, The Struggle Of Unthought Things With Things Eternally Thought.

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.

Her Problem Wasn't She Was A Dumb Blonde, It Was She Wasn't A Blonde And She Wasn't Dumb.

And I’m Drawn To Failure. I Often Write About It, And I’m Sympathetic With It, I Think, Because I Feel I’m Contending With It Constantly In My Own Life.

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.

Though I Revise Constantly As I Write, I Will Usually Revise Much Of The Work Again After I've Reached The Ending.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I Really Love To Set Things In Places That Are Real To Me.

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.

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

'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.

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