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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?

-Joyce Carol Oates

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Why The Need, Rising

Joyce Carol Oates

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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?

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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.

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.

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

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.

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

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 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 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.

The Appeal Of Writing Is Primarily The Investigation Of Mystery.

In Families There Are Frequently Matters Of Which No One Speaks, Nor Even Alludes. There Are No Words For These Matters. As The Binding Skeleton Beneath The Flesh Is Never Acknowledged By Us And, When At Last It Defines Itself, Is After All An Obscenity.

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

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

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

Before I Undertake A Lengthy Project, I Have Usually Given Much Thought To It Over A Period Of Years. My Files Are Filled With Likely Subjects - Which Perhaps, One Day, I Will Develop.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The Great Happiness In Life In Creativity Belongs To Amateurs.

Great Happiness

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

The Worst Cynicism: A Belief In Luck.

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.

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

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.

Evil Isn't A Cosmological Riddle, Only Just Selfish Human Behavior.

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.

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

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

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

Unrequited Love

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.

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

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.

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.

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

There Is Nothing "ordinary" About Reality.

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

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.

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

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

To Write A Novel Is To Embark On A Quest That Is Very Romantic. People Have Visions, And The Next Step Is To Execute Them. That's A Very Romantic Project. Like Edvard Munch's Strange Dreamlike Canvases Where People Are Stylized, Like 'the Scream.' Munch Must Have Had That Vision In A Dream, He Never Saw It.

I Am More Or Less Reading All The Time.

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?

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

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

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.

The Secret Of Being A Writer: Not To Expect Others To Value What You've Done As You Value It. Not To Expect Anyone Else To Perceive In It The Emotions You Have Invested In It. Once This Is Understood, All Will Be Well.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Much In Our Lives Is Chance.

Why Is Humanism Not The Preeminent Belief Of Humankind?

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

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

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.

The Punishment – To The Body, The Brain, The Spirit – A Man Must Endure To Become Even A Moderately Good Boxer Is Inconceivable To Most Of Us Whose Idea Of Personal Risk Is Largely Ego-related Or Emotional.

I Could Never Take The Idea Of Religion Very Seriously.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

A Good, Sympathetic Review Is Always A Wonderful Surprise.

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

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.

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

. . . 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.

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

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.

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.

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

Read Widely, And Without Apology. Read What You Want To Read, Not What Someone Tells You You Should Read.

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

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 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.

Art Originates In Play - In Improvisation, Experiment, And Fantasy; It Remains Forever, In Its Deepest Instincts, Playful And Spontaneous, An Exercise Of The Imagination Analogous To The Exercising Of The Physical Body To No Purpose Other Than Ecstatic Release.

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.

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.

The Best Revenge Is Living Well Without You.

The Third Man In The Ring Makes Boxing Possible.

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

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 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.

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

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.

Near The Point Of Impact, Time Acelerates To The Speed Of Light.

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

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.

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.

My Grandmother Could Never Have Written A Memoir, So 'the Gravedigger's Daughter' Is A Homage To Her Life, And To The Lives Of Other Young Women Of Her Generation, Which Are So Rarely Articulated.

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

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?

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

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

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'm Drawn To Write About Upstate New York In The Way In Which A Dreamer Might Have Recurring Dreams. My Childhood And Girlhood Were Spent In Upstate New York, In The Country North Of Buffalo And West Of Rochester. So This Part Of New York State Is Very Familiar To Me And, With Its Economic Difficulties, Has Become Emblematic Of Much Of American Life.

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.

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

None Of The Rest Of My Life Figures Here.

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

Acting Is The Loneliest Profession I Know.

I Don't Know What Marriages Are Like In General, But There Are Many Things Which I Don't Talk About With My Husband. We Discuss Practical Problems, But I Wouldn't Sit Down With Him And Talk About The Distant Past. It's Somewhat In Contrast To Other Americans, Who Feel That They Have To Confess Things, But I'm Really Not Like That.

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

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.

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.

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

A Daydreamer Is Prepared For Most Things.

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

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.

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

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.

In Love There Are Two Things - Bodies And Words.

For Some Reason, Voters Can Be Brainwashed, And They Vote Sometimes Against Their Own Best Interests, Let Alone Voting Against The Interests Of People Who Need Them, Like People Who Are Disenfranchised And People Who Are Poor And So Forth.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

...[i Am] Utterly Entranced, At Times, With The Mere Fact That There Are Other People, And That They Experience Themselves As The Primary Center Of Consciousness Just As I Do. That Fact Alone...well, That Fact Alone Is Staggering.

Strange: How When A Light Is Extinguished, It's Immediately As If It Has Never Been. Darkness Fills In Again, Complete.

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

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

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.

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

It Is Important For Me To Discover The Ideal Title, For Without This Title The Story Or Novel Isn't Quite In Focus.

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.

We Are The Species That Clamors To Be Lied To.

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

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

My Writing Is Often A Way Of 'bearing Witness' For Others Who Lack The Education And The Opportunity To Tell Their Own Stories, So I Hope That My Writing Won't Be Affected Too Much By My Personal Life.

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.

[emily] Dickinson, Our Supreme Poet Of Inwardness.

There Is A Terrible Weight In All Kinds Of Beauty

Every Scar In My Face Is Worth It.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

I Never Change, I Simply Become More Myself.

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.

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

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

...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.

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.

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.

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.

The Despairing Soul Is A Rebel.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Knowing Oneself

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 Love Insult, It's Always Honest.

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

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

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

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

I Feel A Terrible Loss When I (eventually Must) Complete A Work Of Fiction.

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

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

To Be True To Life, A Novel Must Have An Ending That Is Inevitable Given The Specific Personalities Of The Characters Involved. The Novelist Must Not Impose An Ending Upon Them.

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

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.

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?

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.

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

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

The Greatest Works Of Literature Seem To Embody Both "art" And "morality".

To Love Life For Some Men Is To Love Fighting, For Fighting, And Not Love, Is Seen As Man's Deepest Passion.

Memory Blurs, That's The Point. If Memory Didn't Blur You Wouldn't Have The Fool's Courage To Do Things Again, Again, Again, That Tear You Apart.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

Writing Is The Most Solitary Of Arts.

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?

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