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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.'

-Joyce Carol Oates

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If My Favorite, Most

Joyce Carol Oates

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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.'

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More From Joyce Carol Oates

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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 Regional Voice Is The Universal Voice.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Every Scar In My Face Is Worth It.

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.

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.

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.

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

'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.

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.

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

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

I Never Change, I Simply Become More Myself.

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?

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

When I Was Very Little, Four Or Five, I Did Comic Strip Drawings, So My First Novel Had No Words. I Couldn't Write And Thought Adult Handwriting Was A Mysterious Scribble. When I Was 14, My Grandmother Gave Me A Typewriter And I Started Writing In A Different Way.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Ambitious, Absorbing, And Poignantly Moving.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Food Doesn't Exist, But Can Only Be Invented. And Reinvented.

I'm Very American In The Sense Of Being An Explorer. America Is Filled With People Who Are Interested In Exploring Landscapes, Either External Or Internal. A Westward Nation Of Explorers.

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

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."

There Is A Terrible Weight In All Kinds Of Beauty

Keep A Light, Hopeful Heart. But expect The Worst.

[emily] Dickinson, Our Supreme Poet Of Inwardness.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The Best Revenge Is Living Well Without You.

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.

Why Is Humanism Not The Preeminent Belief Of Humankind?

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.

Running! If There's Any Activity Happier, More Exhilarating, More Nourishing To The Imagination, I Can't Think Of What It Might Be.

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

Writing Is The Most Solitary Of Arts.

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

Knowing Oneself

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.

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

Anyone Who Teaches Knows That You Don't Really Experience A Text Until You've Taught It, In Loving Detail, With An Intelligent And Responsive Class.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 Could Never Take The Idea Of Religion Very Seriously.

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

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.

Celebrate While You Can

You're An Insomniac, You Tell Yourself: There Are Profound Truths Revealed Only To The Insomniac By Night Like Those Phosphorescent Minerals Veined And Glimmering In The Dark But Coarse And Ordinary Otherwise; You Have To Examine Such Minerals In The Absence Of Light To Discover Their Beauty, You Tell Yourself.

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

For The First Time Driving That Day I Could Feel The Motion Of The Earth. The Earth Rushing Through The Emptiness Of Space. Spinning On Its Axis But They Say You Don't Feel It, You Can't Experience It. But To Feel It Is To Be Scared And Happy At Once And To Know That Nothing Matters But That You Do What You Want To Do And What You Do You Are. And I Knew I Was Moving Into The Future. There Is Not Past Anybody Can Get To, To Alter Things Or Ever To Know What Those Things Were But There Is Definitely A Future, We Are Already In It.

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.

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

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.

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.

My Writing Is Full Of Lives I Might Have Led.

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 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.

Stories Come To Us As Wraiths Requiring Precise Embodiments.

For What Is Delusion But The Prelude To Hurt. And What Is Hurt But The Prelude To Rage.

Like Most People, I Can Be Very Easily Hurt.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Tragedy Is The Highest Form Of Art.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Sometimes People Surprise Us. People We Believe We Know.

There Is Nothing "ordinary" About Reality.

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

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.

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.

The Mere Passage Of Time Makes Us All Exiles.

Passage Of Time

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.

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

The Cleaning Is Something I Use As A Reward If I Get Some Work Done. I Go Into A Very Happy State Of Mind When I'm Vacuuming.

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.

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.

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.

And So You Must Grant To God What Is God And Not Try To Think Of What You Have Lost, For That Way Is Madness.

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 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.

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

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

If I'm Writing, I'll Say Something Metaphorical Or Approximate, Whereas Scientists Are Very Precise.

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.

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

Her Visits To Her Former Hometown Were Infrequent And Often Painful. Pilgrimages Fueled By The Tepid Oxygen Of Family Duty, Unease, Guilt. The More Esther Loved Her Parents, The More Helpless She Felt, As They Aged, To Protect Them From Harm. A Moral Coward, She Kept Her Distance.

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.

Fame's Carapace Does Not Allow For Easy Breathing.

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

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 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.

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

A Lot Of Widows Feel That They Have Betrayed Their Spouse By Continuing To Live. It's Deranged Thinking. I Know That, But That Doesn't Stop You Feeling It.

The Television Screen, So Unlike The Movie Screen, Sharply Reduced Human Beings, Revealed Them As Small, Trivial, Flat, In Two Banal Dimensions, Drained Of Color. Wasn't There Something Reassuring About It! -- That Human Beings Were In Fact Merely Images Of A Kind Registered In One Another's Eyes And Brains, Phenomena Composed Of Microscopic Flickering Dots Like Atoms. They Were Atoms -- Nothing More. A Quick Switch Of The Dial And They Disappeared And Who Could Lament The Loss?

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

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

Be Your Own Editor/critic. Sympathetic But Merciless!

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.

I Was Brought Up To Be Sympathetic Toward Others.

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.

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

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.

In A Sense, I May Not Consciously Know What I'm Doing. I Feel That I'm Telling A Story. I'm A Kind Of Medium By Which Something Is Transmitted.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

Having Patience

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

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

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

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.

I've Always Been Interested In Writing About People, Including Young Children Who Are Not Able To Speak For Themselves. As In My Novel 'black Water,' I Provide A Voice For Someone Who Has Died And Can't Speak For Herself.

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

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.

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

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

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

The Worst Cynicism: A Belief In Luck.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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Robert Anderson

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