The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn’t read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.
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.
Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought ‘The Fable’ was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked ‘Tender Is the Night,’ an experimental novel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Every scar in my face is worth it.
The best revenge is living well without you.
None of the rest of my life figures here.
Writing is a consequence of having been ‘haunted’ by material. Why this is, no one knows.
When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.
The body can’t distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.
The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.
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.
Of the widow’s countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband’s death the widow should think I kept myself alive.
Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.
A diverse and lively collection, the highest art of the interview.
The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.
The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it won’t last; nothing can guarantee it.