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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.

-Joyce Carol Oates

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I Think Whenever We

Joyce Carol Oates

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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.

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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.

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

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

Maybe, Love Is Always Forgiveness, To A Degree.

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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.

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

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 Never Change, I Simply Become More Myself.

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

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

The Worst Cynicism: A Belief In Luck.

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Tragedy Is The Highest Form Of Art.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

In Love There Are Two Things - Bodies And Words.

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

Unrequited Love

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.

All That Matters In Life Is Forging Deep Ties Of Love And Family And Friends. Writing And Reading Come Later.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

The Appeal Of Writing Is Primarily The Investigation Of Mystery.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Having Patience

The Regional Voice Is The Universal Voice.

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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