Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
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.
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.
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.
It's very hard to be an experimental woman writer. If I had been writing under a pseudonym, just initials, I might have a different reputation - but, then I couldn't be myself either.
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.
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.
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.
My reputation for writing quickly and effortlessly notwithstanding, I am strongly in favor of intelligent, even fastidious revision, which is, or certainly should be, an art in itself.
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.
Often in gothic novels there's a large house, an estate, and it's symbolic of that culture. Usually it's sort of moldering or rotted or something, and sometimes it's a whole community.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim.
To choose the ideal voice for a character is to give a character an ardent and vivid life, to allow him or her to speak, rather than speaking for them, in an older style of omniscient narration.
When I'm really involved or getting towards the end of a novel, I can write for up to ten hours a day. At those times, it's as though I'm writing a letter to someone I'm desperately in love with.
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.
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.
If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era; and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You're dead, yet alive. There's no sensation so exquisite.
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.
...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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The American dream is a multi-metaphor made up of distinct regions. Many regions of this country are almost like different countries. Even in one state, northern and southern California are like two separate countries.