Quotes on Literature

What I did was take the Jesus of the Gospels, the Son of God, the Son of the Virgin Mary, and sought to make Him utterly believable, a vital breathing character.

Literature is a defense against the attacks of life. It says to life: You can't deceive me. I know your habits, foresee and enjoy watching all your reactions, and steal your secret by involving you in cunning obstructions that halt your normal flow.

Watergate provides a model case study of the interaction and powers of each of the branches of government. It also is a morality play with a sad and dramatic ending.

It was so much fun to have the freedom to wander America, with no assignments. For 25 or 30 years I never had an assignment. These were all stories I wanted to do myself.

All things are subject to decay and when fate summons, monarchs must obey.

I cannot help thinking that the menace of Hell makes as many devils as the severe penal codes of inhuman humanity make villains.

Love is anterior to life, posterior to death, initial of creation, and the exponent of breath.

exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic, romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the crippling sorrow of estrangement.

Not in the clamor of the crowded street, not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.

When we create out of our experiences, as feminists of color, women of color, we have to develop those structures that will present and circulate our culture.

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.

It's possible to take that as a personal metaphor and then multiply it to a people, a race, a sex, a time. If we can keep this thing going long enough, if we can survive and teach what we know, we'll make it.

The history of the world is the world's court of justice.

Everybody knows if you are too careful you are so occupied in being careful that you are sure to stumble over something.

What is the answer? In that case, what is the question?

The winners in life treat their body as if it were a magnificent spacecraft that gives them the finest transportation and endurance for their lives.

Housework, if you do it right, will kill you.

Welcome anything that comes to you, but do not long for anything else.

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

I don't care if the audience is 600 Saul Bellows; I'm going to knock them dead with a comedy routine. I'm out there as a missionary for literature because, if people laugh and enjoy themselves, they might actually do something as bizarre as reading the book.

For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal-this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully-illuminated life.