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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.

-Joyce Carol Oates

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When Writing Goes Painfully,

Joyce Carol Oates

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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.

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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.

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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.

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.

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Though I Am Never Exactly "blocked" I Do Have Difficult Periods. I Am Led By A Fascination With Material - The Challenge Of Presenting It In An Original And Engaging Way. I Have No Problem Imagining Stories, Characters, Distinctive Settings & Themes - But The Difficulty Is Choosing A Voice & A Language In Which To Present It.

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.

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.

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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.

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

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

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

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Acting Is The Loneliest Profession I Know.

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Tragedy Is The Highest Form Of Art.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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Scott Fitzgerald

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.

When You Are Writing Literary Writing, You Are Communicating Something Subtextual With Emotions And Poetry. The Prose Has To Have A Voice; It's Not Just Typing. It Takes A While To Get That Voice.

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

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

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.

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.

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

In Love There Are Two Things - Bodies And Words.

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.

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

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I Could Eat Your Heart & Asshole You'd Never Know It.

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

I Love Insult, It's Always Honest.

We Are The Species That Clamors To Be Lied To.

Like Most People, I Can Be Very Easily Hurt.

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

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.

Death Is Just The Last Scene Of The Last Act.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

A Daydreamer Is Prepared For Most Things.

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

Art Is The Highest Expression Of The Human Spirit.

[emily] Dickinson, Our Supreme Poet Of Inwardness.

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.

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.

Writing Is The Most Solitary Of Arts.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Having Patience

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Great Art Is Cathartic; It Is Always Moral.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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I Want To Tell You That I Love You I Want To Tell You That I Love You I Want To Tell You That I Love I Love I Love I Love But You Do Not.

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.

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I Am Always Reading Or Thinking About Reading.

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

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.

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.

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.

I Don't Think That Writer's Block Exists Really. I Think That When You're Trying To Do Something Prematurely, It Just Won't Come. Certain Subjects Just Need Time, As I've Learned Over And Over Again. You've Got To Wait Before You Write About Them.

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

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

I Come From People Who Did Not Go To College. They Didn't Even Finish High School. People Who One Might Call Ordinary Americans Who Are Very Hardworking.

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 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

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

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'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.

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.

Boxing Has Become America's Tragic Theater.

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

A Good, Sympathetic Review Is Always A Wonderful Surprise.

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

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

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.

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

...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.

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.

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

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Charles W. Pickering

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