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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.

-Joyce Carol Oates

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I Think It's Very

Joyce Carol Oates

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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.

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More From Joyce Carol Oates

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.

Much In Our Lives Is Chance.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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 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

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.

Stories Come To Us As Wraiths Requiring Precise Embodiments.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

The 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Not Even The Most Devastating Truth Can Be Told; It Must Be Evoked.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Dear Girl! Life Is Addictive. Yet We Must Live.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I Am More Or Less Reading All The Time.

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.

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.

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

The Great Happiness In Life In Creativity Belongs To Amateurs.

Great Happiness

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

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

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

The Despairing Soul Is A Rebel.

'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.

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.

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.

My Self Is All To Me. I Don't Have Any Need Of You.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Maybe, Love Is Always Forgiveness, To A Degree.

...[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.

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

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

It'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.

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

A Daydreamer Is Prepared For Most Things.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Writing Is The Most Solitary Of Arts.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Mark Twain Was Very Unhappy With Himself For Various Reasons. He Was Very Unhappy With America Of This Time. He Thought It Was Terrible We Had No Anti-lynching Laws, And He Was Also A Feminist, And He Was Also Very Concerned With Anti-semitism. He Was A Good Man, But He Was Hard On Himself.

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.'

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Art Is The Highest Expression Of The Human Spirit.

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

When 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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 Quiet People Just Do Their Work.

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

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?

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 A Marriage Ends, Who Is Left To Understand It?

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

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

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

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

My Writing Is Full Of Lives I Might Have Led.

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

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

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

Knowing Oneself

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

One Of Life's Minor Satisfactions Is Forgetting.

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.

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

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

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.

Be Your Own Editor/critic. Sympathetic But Merciless!

'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.

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

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

I Never Change, I Simply Become More Myself.

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