Joyce Carol Oates Quotes - Page 16

The other book that I worry no one reads anymore is James Joyce's Ulysses. It's not easy, but every page is wonderful and repays the effort. I started reading it in high school, but I wasn't really able to grasp it. Then I read it in college. I once spent six weeks in a graduate seminar reading it. It takes that long. That's the problem. No one reads that way anymore. People may spend a week with a book, but not six.

I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.

And what is 'art'? - a firestorm rushing through Time, arising from no visible source and conforming to no principles of logic or causality.

[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.

the art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others.

How lawyers make work for one another! You're all priests, worshipping the same god. No wonder you adore one another.

Society is the picnic certain individuals leave early, the party they fail to enjoy, the musical comedy they find not worth the price of admission.

This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.

The domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our writing lives; our imaginations are freed, or stimulated, by the very prospect of companionship, quiet, a predictable and consoling routine.

One writes to memorialize, and to bring to life again that which has been lost.

Betrayal is the deepest wound. Betrayal is what remains of love, when love has gone.

For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?

I love insult, it's always honest.

In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.

Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.

It's rare that we actively and consciously 'forget'; most of the time we have simply forgotten, with no consciousness of having forgotten. In individuals, the phenomenon is called 'denial'; in entire cultures and nations, it's usually called 'history.

A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.'

Art originates in play - in improvisation, experiment, and fantasy; it remains forever, in its deepest instincts, playful and spontaneous, an exercise of the imagination analogous to the exercising of the physical body to no purpose other than ecstatic release.

Only in love is there trust - even the possibility of trust.

The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.

Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real life is a disappointment. That's why we have art.

I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.

Childhood is the province of the imagination and when I immerse myself in it, I re-create it as it was, as it could have been, as I wanted - and didn't want - it to be.

Budapest in late May is a city of lilacs. The sweet, languid, rather sleepy smell of lilacs wafts everywhere. And it is a city of lovers, many of them quite middle-aged. Walking with their arms around each other, embracing and kissing on park benches. A sensuousness very much bound up (it seems to me) with the heady ubiquitous smell of lilacs.

A diverse and lively collection, the highest art of the interview.