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.
Joyce Carol OatesRead
You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of connecting with the present audience over trying to achieve timelessness in writing.
Joyce Carol Oates highlights that writers should focus on their current audience rather than worrying excessively about how their work will be perceived in the future. The notion is that if writers engage sincerely with their contemporaries, their work may indeed stand the test of time and resonate with future generations.
In practice
This quote would be fitting to use during a workshop on writing, emphasizing the importance of engaging with current trends and audiences.
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.
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'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.
My writing is often a way of 'bearing witness' for others who lack the education and the opportunity to tell their own stories, so I hope that my writing won't be affected too much by my personal life.
The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.
. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.
Art really has its source in the transcendent, the unmanifest field of pure consciousness, which is the non-changing, immortal field of all possibilities...When the awareness of the artist is in tune with this center of infinite creativity, his piece of art breathes fullness of life, nourishes the creator, the artist, and inspires his admirers with waves of bliss.
Music is the perfect type of art.
Great art is always a way of concentrating, reinventing what is called fact, what we know of our existence- a reconcentration… tearing away the veils, the attitudes people acquire of their time and earlier time. Really good artists tear down those veils
The inmost spirit of poetry, in other words, is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world.
What art seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.
I've known since I was five that I wanted to be a writer.
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