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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.

-Joyce Carol Oates

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The Challenge Is To

Joyce Carol Oates

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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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.

The Worst Cynicism: A Belief In Luck.

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.

Because The Meaning Of A Story Does Not Lie On Its Surface, Visible And Self-defining, Does Not Mean That Meaning Does Not Exist. Indeed, The Ambiguity Of Meaning, Its Inner Private Quality, May Well Be Part Of The Writer's Vision.

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

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.

It Feels Good, Honey, But It Isn't Love.

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.

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.)

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

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.

Alone, She Took Hot Baths And Sat Exhausted In The Steaming Water, Wondering At Her Perpetual Exhaustion. All That Winter She Noticed The Limp, Languid Weight Of Her Arms, Her Veins Bulging Slightly With The Pressure Of Her Extreme Weariness ... One Day In January She Drew A Razor Blade Lightly Across The Inside Of Her Arm, Near The Elbow, To See What Would Happen.

The 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.

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

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.

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

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

...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.

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

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

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.

Sometimes I Read Reviews, And Without Exception I Will Read Critical Essays That Are Sent To Me. The Critical Essays Are Interesting On Their Own Terms.

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

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

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

It Would Be Difficult For A Writer Of Realism To Avoid Suggesting A Political/moral Perspective In His Or Her Fiction. "politics" Per Se Is Absent From My Writing But There Is Usually A Moral (if Ironic) Compass.

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

Knowing Oneself

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Most People Think That A Widow Is Inhabiting Some Elegiac World Of - It's Like Mozart's 'requiem Mass.' You Know, It's Very Beautiful And Elevated Thoughts And Some Measure Of Dignity. I Didn't Have That Experience At All. I Had One Pratfall After Another.

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

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

'the Accursed' Is Very Much A Novel About Social Injustice As The Consequence Of The Terrible, Tragic Division Of Classes - The Exploitation Not Only Of Poor And Immigrant Workers But Of Their Young Children In Factories And Mills - And As The Consequence Of Race Hatred In The Aftermath Of The Civil War And The Freeing Of The Slaves.

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

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.

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

My Belief Is That Art Should Not Be Comforting; For Comfort, We Have Mass Entertainment And One Another. Art Should Provoke, Disturb, Arouse Our Emotions, Expand Our Sympathies In Directions We May Not Anticipate And May Not Even Wish.

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.

Ideas Brush Past Fleeting And Insubstantial As Moths. But I Let Them Go, I Don't Want Them. What I Want Is A Voice.

And I’m Drawn To Failure. I Often Write About It, And I’m Sympathetic With It, I Think, Because I Feel I’m Contending With It Constantly In My Own Life.

I Was Brought Up To Be Sympathetic Toward Others.

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

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.

Much In Our Lives Is Chance.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

The Quiet People Just Do Their Work.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I Am More Or Less Reading All The Time.

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.

I Did Not Consider That I Would Lead A Literary Life. I'd Thought Initially, As A Young Girl, That I Would Be A Teacher, Since I So Admired Many Of My Teachers. And Though I Loved Writing, I Did Not Ever Think Of Myself As A Writer.

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

You Can't Deny Eros. Eros Wills Trike, Like Lightning. Our Human Defenses Are Frail, Ludicrous. Like Plasterboard Houses In A Hurricane. Your Triumph Is In Perfect Submission. And The God Of Eros Will Flow Through You, As Lawrence Says, In The 'perfect Obliteration Of Blood Consciousness.

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.

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

Each Time I Undertake To Reread Virginia Woolf, I Am Somewhat Baffled By The Signature Breathlessness And Relentlessly "poetic" Tone, The Shimmering Impressionism, So Very Different From The Vivid, Precise, Magisterial (and Often Very Funny) Prose Of Her Contemporary James Joyce.

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

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

Maybe, Love Is Always Forgiveness, To A Degree.

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

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

Blood Transforms The Warm Bath Water And, In It, I See Weakly That This Was A Mistake. The Razor's Cut Is Not Deep, Nevertheless The Blood Rushes Out Happily In The Warm Water As If Kin To It, The Same Tender Substance. Rising A New Person Transformed With An Icy Sense Of Error I Go To The Sink And Turn On Cold Water Which Is Not Friendly To Blood. The Cut Is Deeper Than Imagined.

Very Few Writers Of Distinction In Fact Were Outstanding As Undergraduates.

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

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.

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

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

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."

Death Is Just The Last Scene Of The Last Act.

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.

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

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.

The Great Happiness In Life In Creativity Belongs To Amateurs.

Great Happiness

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?

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

And This Is The Forbidden Truth, The Unspeakable Taboo - That Evil Is Not Always Repellent But Frequently Attractive; That It Has The Power To Make Of Us Not Simply Victims, As Nature And Accident Do, But Active Accomplices.

The Mere Passage Of Time Makes Us All Exiles.

Passage Of Time

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

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.

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.

Art Is The Highest Expression Of The Human Spirit.

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

We Are The Species That Clamors To Be Lied To.

What Is A Family, After All, Except Memories? Haphazard And Precious As The Contents Of A Catch-all Drawer In The Kitchen.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

Art Is A Means Of Memorialization Of The Past, A Record Of A Rapidly Vanishing World; A Means Of Exorcising, At Least Temporarily, The Ravages Of Homesickness. To Speak Of 'what Is Past, Or Passing Or To Come'-in The Most Meticulous Language Thereby To Assure Its Permanence; To Honor Those We've Loved And Learned From And Must Outlive.

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.

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

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.

The Appeal Of Writing Is Primarily The Investigation Of Mystery.

I Love Insult, It's Always Honest.

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.

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.

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

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

I'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.

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 Other Book That I Worry No One Reads Anymore Is James Joyce's Ulysses. It's Not Easy, But Every Page Is Wonderful And Repays The Effort. I Started Reading It In High School, But I Wasn't Really Able To Grasp It. Then I Read It In College. I Once Spent Six Weeks In A Graduate Seminar Reading It. It Takes That Long. That's The Problem. No One Reads That Way Anymore. People May Spend A Week With A Book, But Not Six.

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

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

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

Fame's Carapace Does Not Allow For Easy Breathing.

Except That Awards Are Competitive, Which Is A Negative Thing, They Are Wonderful For Singling Out Deserving Individuals And Bringing Their Work To The Attention Of Many Potential Readers Who Might Otherwise Have Been Totally Unaware Of Them.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

People Have Libraries At Home, They Have Bookshelves, They Have Cds. And They Sort Of Try, People Try To Bring Great Artists Into Their Lives, Into Their Physical Houses And Sort Of Live With Portions Of Them. But They're Not Really Deeply Engaging With Them.

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

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

The Novel Is The Affliction For Which Only The Novel Is The Cure.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Most People Who Are Writers Go Through Periods When They Can't Write.

Why Is Humanism Not The Preeminent Belief Of Humankind?

Great Art Is Cathartic; It Is Always Moral.

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

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

A Good, Sympathetic Review Is Always A Wonderful Surprise.

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.

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

A Writer Who Has Published As Many Books As I Have Has Developed, Of Necessity, A Hide Like A Rhino's, While Inside There Dwells A Frail, Hopeful Butterfly Of A Spirit.

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.'

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

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.

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.

[emily] Dickinson, Our Supreme Poet Of Inwardness.

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

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 Am Always Reading Or Thinking About Reading.

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

I Suggest To My Students That They Write Under A Pseudonym For A Week. That Allows Young Men To Write As Women, And Women As Men. It Allows Them A Lot Of Freedom They Don't Have Ordinarily.

'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'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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Unrequited Love

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.

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

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

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.

Tragedy Is The Highest Form Of Art.

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.

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

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

A Lawyer Is Basically A Mouth, Like A Shark Is A Mouth Attached To A Long Gut. The Business Of Lawyers Is To Talk, To Interrupt One Another, And To Devour Each Other If Possible.

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 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 Never Change, I Simply Become More Myself.

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.

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

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.

I Could Never Take The Idea Of Religion Very Seriously.

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

I 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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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