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.
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.
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.
To be knocked out doesn’t mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.
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.
The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.
The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.
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.
Productivity is a relative matter. And it’s really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer’s strongest books.
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.
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.