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I Can Entertain The Proposition That Life Is A Metaphor For Boxing--for One Of Those Bouts That Go On And On, Round Following Round, Jabs, Missed Punches, Clinches, Nothing Determined, Again The Bell And Again And You And Your Opponent So Evenly Matched It's Impossible Not To See That Your Opponent Is You.... Life Is Like Boxing In Many Unsettling Respects. But Boxing Is Only Like Boxing.

-Joyce Carol Oates

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I Can Entertain The

Joyce Carol Oates

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I Can Entertain The Proposition That Life Is A Metaphor For Boxing--for One Of Those Bouts That Go On And On, Round Following Round, Jabs, Missed Punches, Clinches, Nothing Determined, Again The Bell And Again And You And Your Opponent So Evenly Matched It's Impossible Not To See That Your Opponent Is You.... Life Is Like Boxing In Many Unsettling Respects. But Boxing Is Only Like Boxing.

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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.

'we Were The Mulvaneys' Is Perhaps The Novel Closest To My Heart. I Think Of It As A Valentine To A Passing Way Of American Life, And To My Own Particular Child - And Girlhood In Upstate New York. Everyone In The Novel Is Enormously Close To Me, Including Marianne's Cat, Muffin, Who Was In Fact My Own Cat.

The Act Of Sending A Letter Is An Act Of Generosity, Even If, In Retrospect, It Might Seem Reckless. Why Regret One's Generosity? Why Regret One's Impulsiveness, One's Misjudgment Of Others? The Inevitable Discovery That Someone Is Selling Letters You'd Written In Trust Is Simply To Discover An Obvious Human Truth: There Are Those Who Don't Cherish Us As We'd Cherished Them, And Had Wished To Be Cherished By Them.

We Are The Species That Clamors To Be Lied To.

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

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.

... 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.)

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 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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

I'm Drawn To Write About Upstate New York In The Way In Which A Dreamer Might Have Recurring Dreams. My Childhood And Girlhood Were Spent In Upstate New York, In The Country North Of Buffalo And West Of Rochester. So This Part Of New York State Is Very Familiar To Me And, With Its Economic Difficulties, Has Become Emblematic Of Much Of American Life.

I Do What I Want To Do. It Was A Brash Statement Of(her)girlhood. Now She Was An Adult, The Boast Seemed Quaint. For Rarely Do You Know What You Want. Even After You've Done It You Can't Say Clearly If That Was What You'd Wanted Or Just Something That Happened To You, Like Weather.

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.

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 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.

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

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

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

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 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.

That Is The Mystery: Reading Henry James Can Yield Prose That Is Contrary To James, Yet Inspired By Him. Who Can Understand This?

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.

The Regional Voice Is The Universal Voice.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The Mere Passage Of Time Makes Us All Exiles.

Passage Of Time

I've Always Been So Interested In Personal History. I'm Very Fascinated By My Parents' And My Grandparents' Generations. I Seem To Think That They Had A Resilience And An Integrity That May Be Somewhat Deficient In My Own Generation, And In Subsequent Generations As Well, Because America Has Been Rather Easy To Live In Since The Depression.

A Diverse And Lively Collection, The Highest Art Of The Interview.

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

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

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

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

God's Blessing Is Not Always To Be Distinguished From His Wrath.

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.

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.

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.

Great Art Is Cathartic; It Is Always Moral.

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

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

As A Farm Girl, Even When I Was Quite Young, I Had My 'farm Chores' - But I Had Time Also To Be Alone, To Explore The Fields, Woods And Creek Side. And To Read.

I'm Nobody's Daughter Now. I'm Through With That.

I Love Insult, It's Always Honest.

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

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

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.

The Mysteries Of The Female Sex! We Men Can Never Hope To Fathom Your Depths, But Only Try Not To Drown In Them.

Be Your Own Editor/critic. Sympathetic But Merciless!

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.

Life Is Like Boxing In Many Unsettling Respects. But Boxing Is Only Like Boxing.

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

Was It Confusing Because It Was Artistic, Or Artistic Because It Was Confusing?

In No Other Sport Is The Connection Between Performer And Observer So Intimate, So Frequently Painful, So Unresolved

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

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.

My Writing Is Often A Way Of 'bearing Witness' For Others Who Lack The Education And The Opportunity To Tell Their Own Stories, So I Hope That My Writing Won't Be Affected Too Much By My Personal Life.

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.

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.

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.

"because There Has Been No One To Stop Me" Has Been One Of The Principles Of My Life.

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

Reading Is The Sole Means By Which We Slip, Involuntarily, Often Helplessly, Into Another's Skin, Another's Voice, Another's Soul.

The - The Sort Of Thing That I Want To Do Is To Strike A Resonant Chord Of Universality In Other People, Which Is Best Done By Fiction.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

The Domestic Lives We Live - Which May Be Accidental, Or Not Entirely Of Our Making - Help To Make Possible Our Writing Lives; Our Imaginations Are Freed, Or Stimulated, By The Very Prospect Of Companionship, Quiet, A Predictable And Consoling Routine.

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

Why Is Humanism Not The Preeminent Belief Of Humankind?

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

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.

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

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

Art Is The Highest Expression Of The Human Spirit.

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.

Stories Come To Us As Wraiths Requiring Precise Embodiments.

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

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.

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

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.

I Am What Would Be Called A 'mainstream Feminist,' Not A Radical Feminist.

I Am Always Reading Or Thinking About Reading.

Writing Is The Most Solitary Of Arts.

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.

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.

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

Unrequited Love

There Is Nothing "ordinary" About Reality.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Of Our Hurts We Make Monuments Of Survival. If We Survive.

Writers Are Notoriously Unable To Know About Themselves. Faulkner Thought 'the Fable' Was His Best Novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald Liked 'tender Is The Night,' An Experimental Novel.

Scott Fitzgerald

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I Was Writing Novels In High School And Apprenticed Myself In A Way Both To Faulkner And To Hemingway.

Prose-it Might Be Speculated-is Discourse; Poetry Ellipsis. Prose Is Spoken Aloud; Poetry Overheard. The One Is Presumably Articulate And Social, A Shared Language, The Voice Of "communication"; The Other Is Private, Allusive, Teasing, Sly, Idiosyncratic As The Spider's Delicate Web, A Kind Of Witchcraft Unfathomable To Ordinary Minds.

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.

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

For Madness Must Be Punished In A World In Which Mere Sanity Is Prized. The Revenge Of The Ordinary Upon The Gifted.

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

I Can Entertain The Proposition That Life Is A Metaphor For Boxing--for One Of Those Bouts That Go On And On, Round Following Round, Jabs, Missed Punches, Clinches, Nothing Determined, Again The Bell And Again And You And Your Opponent So Evenly Matched It's Impossible Not To See That Your Opponent Is You.... Life Is Like Boxing In Many Unsettling Respects. But Boxing Is Only Like Boxing.

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

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.

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.

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

I Have Read On A Kindle. But The Kindle We Had Only Worked For About Eight Months Then It Stopped Working. You Don't Have To Get Books Repaired.

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.

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.

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.

After My Parents Passed Away - In 2000 And 2003 - I Felt I Could Take The Time To Think About The Past And Imagine What It Would Have Been Like To Be My Grandmother.

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.

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?

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

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.

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

In Love There Are Two Things - Bodies And Words.

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.

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

Ambitious, Absorbing, And Poignantly Moving.

The Despairing Soul Is A Rebel.

Night Comes To The Desert All At Once, As If Someone Turned Off The Light.

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.

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.

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.

By The Way Of Connecting With Subject, With Theme, I Was Able To Find A Kind Of Lifeline. Writing's Like A Lifeline. You Have To Get The Right Way In. Otherwise The Material Just Lies There, And You Can't Do Anything With It.

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.

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.

I Was Brought Up To Be Sympathetic Toward Others.

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.

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

Knowing Oneself

The Great Menace To The Life Of An Industry Is Industrial Self-complacency.

Flying Fosters Fantasies Of Childhood, Of Omnipotence, Rapid Shifts Of Being, Miraculous Moments; It Stirs Our Capacity For Dreaming.

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.

Acting Is The Loneliest Profession I Know.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Memory Blurs, That's The Point. If Memory Didn't Blur You Wouldn't Have The Fool's Courage To Do Things Again, Again, Again, That Tear You Apart.

...[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.

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.

The Great Happiness In Life In Creativity Belongs To Amateurs.

Great Happiness

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.

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

I Could Never Take The Idea Of Religion Very Seriously.

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

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