In love there are two things – bodies and words.
We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once it’s gone – its value is incontestable.
Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.
Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming – In thinking, not writing.
The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.
Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.
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.
One of life’s minor satisfactions is forgetting.
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.
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.