The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

I should say, one of the things about being a widow or a widower, you really, really need a sense of humor, because everything's going to fall apart.

When I wrote 'We Were The Mulvaneys,' I was just old enough to look back upon my own family life and the lies of certain individuals close to me, with the detachment of time. I wanted to tell the truth about secrets: How much pain they give, yet how much relief, even happiness we may feel when at last the motive for secrecy has passed.

Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse.

Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.

Often in gothic novels there's a large house, an estate, and it's symbolic of that culture. Usually it's sort of moldering or rotted or something, and sometimes it's a whole community.

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books.

As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my 'farm chores' - but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.

It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.

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.

My parents were very proud of me. After they passed, my career doesn't mean as much to me.

'We Were the Mulvaneys' is perhaps the novel closest to my heart. I think of it as a valentine to a passing way of American life, and to my own particular child - and girlhood in upstate New York. Everyone in the novel is enormously close to me, including Marianne's cat, Muffin, who was in fact my own cat.

Yes, 'Black Girl/White Girl' might be described as a 'coming-of-age' novel, at least for the survivor Genna. It is also intended as a comment on race relations in America more generally: we are 'roommates' with one another, but how well do we know one another?

We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.

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.

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.

To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.

Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.

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.

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.

As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era; and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University.

If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.

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.

Any kind of creative activity is likely to be stressful. The more anxiety, the more you feel that you are headed in the right direction. Easiness, relaxation, comfort - these are not conditions that usually accompany serious work.

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.

A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.

I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

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.

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.

You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.

Writers and artists never pay attention to advice given by their elders, quite rightly. The only worthwhile advice is the most general: 'Keep trying, don't give up, don't be discouraged, don't pay attention to detractors.' Everyone knows this.

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.

I don't read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I'm also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.

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

Boxing has become America's tragic theater.

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 could never take the idea of religion very seriously.

As a child. I grew up on a small farm, so I did a lot of drawings of animals, chickens and people. At the bottom of every page, I'd put a strange scribble. I was emulating adult handwriting, though I didn't actually know how to write.

My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.

I was brought up to be sympathetic toward others.

I really love to set things in places that are real to me.

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.