Zitat des Tages von Joyce Carol Oates:
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.
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.
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 writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.
In 'We Were the Mulvaneys,' animals are almost as important as people. I wanted to show the tenderness in our relationships with cats, dogs, and horses. Especially cats.
Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.
I think whenever we think of our hometowns, we tend to think of very specific people: with whom you rode on the school bus, who was your next door neighbor you were playing with, who your girlfriend was. It's always something very specific.
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.
I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.
If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.
If a book I've committed myself to review turns out to be 'disappointing' I make an effort to present it objectively to the reader, including a good number of excerpts from the text, so that the reader might form his or her own opinion independent of my own.
People who are disenfranchised politically and people who are poor often don't vote. They often don't elect politicians, so the politicians who are supporting them are really being very charitable, because they're not going to give them billions of dollars in campaign funds.
I'm drawn to failure. I feel like I'm contending with it constantly in my own life.
Boxing has become America's tragic theater.
'A Fair Maiden' existed in notes and sketches for perhaps a year. When I traveled, I would take along with me my folder of notes - 'ideas for stories.' Eventually, I began to write it and wrote it fairly swiftly - in perhaps two months of fairly intense writing and rewriting. Most of my time writing is really re-writing.
Where we come from in America no longer signifies. It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are.
One writes to memorialize, and to bring to life again that which has been lost.
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.
I remember once asking Grandma about a book she was reading, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and how she answered me: this was the first conversation of my life that concerned a book, and 'the life of the mind' - and now, such subjects have become my life.
I don't know what marriages are like in general, but there are many things which I don't talk about with my husband. We discuss practical problems, but I wouldn't sit down with him and talk about the distant past. It's somewhat in contrast to other Americans, who feel that they have to confess things, but I'm really not like that.
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.
No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.
I was brought up to be sympathetic toward others.
My students often say, 'My roommate read this story and really liked it,' and it's hard to convince them that there are things wrong with it. I say, 'Well, people who love you want you to be happy. But I'm your professor and I'm supposed to be teaching you something.'
Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.
To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.
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.
The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.
I would suggest the widow do things the husband used to do, so he seems to be there with you. You will feel like just going to bed. It's so wonderful, going to bed.
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.
We are all regionalists in our origins, however 'universal' our themes and characters, and without our cherished hometowns and childhood landscapes to nourish us, we would be like plants set in shallow soil. Our souls must take root - almost literally.
Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.
We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.
To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.
Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.
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.