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.
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.
I never really knew I wanted to ‘be’ a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.
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.
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.
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.
Honorary degrees and lifetime achievement awards are very encouraging. I know that it might sound strange that a writer who has published many books still needs encouragement, but this is true.
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.
Princeton is quite integrated. Women are professors at Princeton. Women are students at Princeton. That began in the 1970s.
People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.
Detroit, my ‘great’ subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am – for better or worse.
All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later.
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.
A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.
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 need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.
I can’t say I was a very successful sorority girl.
Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.
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.
When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.