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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.

-Joyce Carol Oates

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I'm Drawn To Write

Joyce Carol Oates

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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.

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In Love There Are Two Things - Bodies And Words.

I Am Always Reading Or Thinking About Reading.

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

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

The Despairing Soul Is A Rebel.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

It's Hard To Say How We Compare To Other People. We Each Inhabit Our Own Personalities. I Have Often Felt That I'm A Very Neutral Being And That I Have Almost No Personality. I'm Drawn To Writing Partly Because I'm Fascinated By The Mimetic Process.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Literature, Art, Like Civilization Itself, Are Only Accidents.

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

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

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

Keeing Busy" Is The Remedy For All The Ills In America. It's Also The Means By Which The Creative Impulse Is Destroyed.

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

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.

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

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.

There Is Nothing "ordinary" About Reality.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Much In Our Lives Is Chance.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boxing Has Become America's Tragic Theater.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.)

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Having Patience

I Could Never Take The Idea Of Religion Very Seriously.

Sometimes People Surprise Us. People We Believe We Know.

Tragedy Is The Highest Form Of Art.

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

There Is A Terrible Weight In All Kinds Of Beauty

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

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.

Acting Is The Loneliest Profession I Know.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Regional Voice Is The Universal Voice.

[emily] Dickinson, Our Supreme Poet Of Inwardness.

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

The Mere Passage Of Time Makes Us All Exiles.

Passage Of Time

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

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.

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

Like Most People, I Can Be Very Easily Hurt.

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

I Was Brought Up To Be Sympathetic Toward Others.

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.

Why Should I Want What's Good For Me?' Beatrice Asked Him, Smiling. 'is That What You Want For Yourself - Only What's Good For You?

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

If My Favorite, Most Comfortable Place Is By Our Fireplace In Cold Weather, Expedient Places Are On An Airplane, In A Waiting Room Or Even Waiting In Line; Frequently These Days, While On The Phone Having Been 'put On Hold.'

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

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.

We Come Away From The Tragedies Of [william] Shakespeare With A Profound Sense Of Having Encountered Reality In Its Most Pristine Form - Yet The Art-work Is Elaborately Artificial, The Very Genre Of Tragedy In Poetry An Anti-naturalist Perspective.

Better To Be Despised, Then, Than To Be Ignored; Or Damned With Condescending Praise.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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'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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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?

I Think All Art Comes Out Of Conflict. When I Write I Am Always Looking For The Dramatic Kernel Of An Event, The Junctures Of People's Lives When They Go In One Direction, Not Another.

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

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

Maybe, Love Is Always Forgiveness, To A Degree.

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

A Good, Sympathetic Review Is Always A Wonderful Surprise.

I Never Change, I Simply Become More Myself.

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

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 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.

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.

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

Art Is The Highest Expression Of The Human Spirit.

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

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."

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

People Might Be Surprised To Know How Much I Throw Away. For Every Page I Publish, I Throw 10 Pages Away.

Every Scar In My Face Is Worth It.

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

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

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

We Are The Species That Clamors To Be Lied To.

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

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.

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.

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

My Writing Is Full Of Lives I Might Have Led.

Whoever Was Stupid Was Beneath Worry Or Thought; You Did Not Have To Figure Them Out. This Eliminated Hundreds Of People. In This Life You Had Time Only For A Certain Amount Of Thinking, And There Was No Need To Waste Any Of It On People Who Were Not Threatening.

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

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

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

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Michael Ondaatje

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