Novelists From New York City

"He began quietly to tell her the details of Kenny's letter, and as she listened she thought with a kind of tired and comfortable amusement that the ghosts were really catching up with her. Ralph, or her lie to herself, had kept them away for more than a year. But all ghosts had the right, sooner or later, to frighten the people they haunted. (book 5 chapter 2)"

"It was night in her lovely Ballroom, where a dream was completely safe. (book 4 chapter 3)"

"In the darkness, he found her and it was as if the discovery encompassed him at the same time. She was in a secret forest-place of night, where no pain could enter. His body, his lips and hands, made gleams of light by which she could read at last all the answers to hunger. (book 3 chapter 6)"

"In showing how a Jew or a lesbian stood outside the cultural mainstream in America in the early 1940s, Sinclair pioneered comparisons of sexual and ethnic difference."

"Sometimes books don't find us until the right time."

"We aren’t the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on"

"I see gaming as having the possibility to be a profoundly empathetic experience. I think the idea of the gamer, like the capital-G Gamer, this kind of misogynist dude shouting insults at women, is antiquated and not true. If you look at it, there are so many people that have played games their entire lives, like myself, that don’t necessarily identify themselves as gamers in that sense...the idea that, again, the person who is a gamer is somebody who is less empathetic, less romantic, or less trying to seek human connection is sort of old fashioned or possibly just ignorant."

"You know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?"

"privacy gives you creative freedom."

"I like to believe, as a writer, that anybody who isn't a reader yet has just not found the right book."

"We all live at that intersection of art and technology. That’s where games live, in a really easy way to see."

"I myself am mixed race — my mother is Korean and my father is an American Jew — so I've always felt other. But I think what's a little bit amazing about books, again, is the way in which they can sort of transcend that to an extent. And I also wanted the world as I see it — and the world as I see it is a world that is increasingly [filled] with people [of] different ethnicities."

"“And what is love, in the end?" Alabaster said. "Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else's journey through life?”"

"“The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.”"

"Generally, the best art comes from people that are a bit alienated from the system. I think it’s that friction that actually leads to making good books or good games, and not just being like, I’m a company man, or something for that system."

"I think the reason I liked gaming so much as a subject was because it has all the subjects in it—it’s a grand subject."

"I believe in the possibility for real human connections in virtual spaces. I also believe that the virtual version of yourself might very well be the best and truest version of yourself...We don’t have to necessarily be the worst versions of ourselves behind the mask of an avatar, though it often seems as if we are. People think we have it all figured out in certain ways, but in fact we’re just babies and toddlers when it comes to all these issues. We haven’t figured out exactly the best way to be good citizens, good humans online yet, and that’s OK. Because all these things are really young."

"Art provides a canvas for the artist to convey things which she might not be able to express verbally, putting distance between herself, the subject matter, and the person experiencing it — the viewer or spectator."

"I never strongly identified with Puerto Rican writers from Puerto Rico. My writing comes from a different sensibility. However, we do share ethnicity. What some of them write about doesn't necessarily hold that much interest for me. It's also a question of social class. There is a certain classism in all of this. We are different because we write in another language. We are not living in a void. Some of their writing, as I said in my essay Puerto Rican Writers in the United States, Puerto Rican Writers in Puerto Rico: A Separation Beyond Language, is very baroque. I find that hard to relate to. I might have more in common with people writing in places like Prague or Ecuador. I have, however, read and liked very much Julia de Burgos and José Luis González and Magali García Ramis. But things are changing now. Now we have some Puerto Rican writers writing in English, like Rosario Ferré. That seems to indicate change."

"I am always glad to express gratitude to the library, I spent my youth there, reading Nancy Drew mysteries, Jack London novels, and the works of Fenimore Cooper. But I never read about myself or about black people. Eventually, at 14, I discovered Howard Fast and that was quite wonderful."

"Nicholasa Mohr has proclaimed, over and over again-in her writings, in her words-her great love for New York, the city in which she was born and raised. She is a "Latino" New Yorker whose great warmth and openness, whose wide, welcoming smile embody the best of Puerto Rican social culture in that city."

"I tackle that reality, how the children of Puerto Ricans who go back to the island are surprised when they find that what their parents talked about is a myth, that it no longer exists."

"I feel a citizen of the world. I'm not really a Nationalist. I'm very fortunate; I can embrace any culture in the world and feel quite at home. That's a joy for me. New York gave me a sense of belonging that is not constricted by nationalism."

"The island of Puerto Rico is a small but complicated place. It's the only place in the world, I think, where you have a Latin American culture and you're an American citizen. I wrote a paper published by the University of Oklahoma's Department of Psychology about Puerto Ricans being like adopted citizens. I describe myself as an adopted citizen, much like a child who has been adopted by a family. He or she doesn't look like that family and longs to know who his or her parents really are. I was taught in the schools that Americans adopted Puerto Rico, it is not a real country. So, am I supposed to be forever grateful because someone adopted us and took us in? The Spaniards first, and then the United States? How does a child, then, form an identity?"

"I've read...some of the people who are sort of like poets but are prose writers like Grace Paley and Cynthia Ozick."

"Cynthia Ozick is one of America’s greatest living writers. What makes her work breathtaking is its unvarying subject, a single idea that encompasses all that marks American life, Jewish tradition and every other challenge to the world as it is: ambition."

"Remember Cynthia Ozick's story, "The Shawl"? In that extraordinarily moving story, Ozick doesn't once mention the word, Holocaust; she focuses on the conflicts of a mother and her two daughters trying to survive the horrors of death-camp internment. That's what good fiction does, and should do."

"("On why she writes") Because I can't not. I mean, what else am I going to do with my life? That's another way of putting it. I simply must. Writers simply can't help themselves. In a way they're sort of like the queen of England. Every writer is doomed to his or her profession. What else is the queen going to do with her life? She was born a queen; she's stuck. And writers are stuck, too."

"I don't think one writes for immortality. I think beginning writers always think they will have fame. But if fame — which is power — is what you want, then you'll get it, probably. But it's not something necessary to want or need."

"She is the master of the casual, searing image; in a department store in Foreign Bodies, a woman is ambushed by "floating tongues of perfume". During an awkward conversation between two people "a stillness blundered between them." In Heir to the Glimmering World, Professor Mitwisser, a Jewish exile from Nazi Germany, has eyes "acutely blue . . . I was shocked by their waver of bewilderment – like heat vibrating across a field.""

"Cynthia Ozick, in her landmark feminist essay "Notes Toward Finding the Right Question," has strikingly if shockingly-lamented the exclusion of women from the tradition of Jewish learning and creativity as "one of the cruelest events in Jewish history.""

"(If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?) “History of the Jews,” by Heinrich Graetz…it taught me that a writer lacking history, however gifted, is an empty sack."

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) Language as the well of image and feeling. Nabokov rather than Hemingway. If less is more, it is nevertheless also loss. And the easy vernacular is deprivation."

"I have argued this question, novel versus essays, and I do come out on the novel side. Because though both these forms use intellect and imagination, they do it in different proportions — the essay more on the intellect side and the novel more on the imaginative side. And the imaginative is freedom. You're at liberty to inhabit other people — including the bad guys — which is sometimes very thrilling, since you won't do it in real life. (On how imagining "the bad guy" relates to empathy) It's the beginning of empathy, indeed. And it's also a place where you can make judgments, where you can enter other people's minds and at the same time subtly, not didactically, not as if you're giving a sermon or a tract. But you can also make judgments, and they can be social judgments, moral judgments, metaphysical judgments."

"Sometimes repugnance overrides psychological curiosity, and sometimes psychological curiosity is no more illuminating than pornography."

"(And about your favorite poem.) “Dover Beach,” by Matthew Arnold. And running neck-and-neck, Shelley’s “Ozymandias” and Auden’s “September 1, 1939.” All are cutting-edge images of the 21st century so far."

"no book makes me furious. Maybe sad, or lost, or confused, but mostly joy and wonder are the emotions involved. That’s why I prefer books to people."

"there was a time when a new novel came out — let's take Saul Bellow — and it was a public event. And really, it wasn't just an elitist hobby. I remember — this goes way, way back into my early childhood — when Gone with the Wind was published, the world was whirling around this novel. I remember walking to school and seeing shopkeepers sitting outside their shops reading Gone with the Wind. This was an event. It changed people's minds. Maybe I have a yearning for that, though I don't see it would ever happen again. On the other hand, didn't we see that with Downton Abbey? So maybe it isn't all lost."

"sometimes starting is so difficult. Because it's all chaos. It's the difference between writing an essay, which if it's about Henry James, at least you know that much. But with fiction you don't. It could be a scene in your mind or it could be some kind of tendril that you can barely define. So I have to force it. And then after – and this is real compulsion, real self-flagellation – it kind of takes off. But there's a lot of agony before. And sometimes during. And sometimes all through. But just before the end and revelations start coming, that's the joy. But mostly its hell."

"In the middle of the war there was Heine, there was Goethe, there was Schiller. I did posters for the German club, in the middle of the war. When I think back to how happy I was, studying German and flunking algebra, and I think what was going on for other Jewish teenagers on the other side of the world, I'm so puzzled by those dates."

"I think the word is intractable. I blame the lack of live and let live. And which side is it coming from more than the other side? I think it is coming from people who call other people infidels. That's how it strikes me." Was she moved the first time she went to Israel? "Yes. Probably not like my father, who was simply swept away. He couldn't get over that he had ascended Mount Zion. I don't see any solution here. I'm despairing. That's where I stand."

"I always knew that this was what I wanted to do. I think this is true of most writers — especially anybody who's read Little Women, which is every writer. Not so much the male writers, let's admit it, but every writer who grows up has wanted to be Jo."

"(Tell us about your favorite short story.) There are too many to be tempted to isolate only one, so here are five: “Lighea” (sometimes titled “The Professor and the Mermaid”), by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa; “My Quarrel With Hersh Rasseyner,” by Chaim Grade; Chekhov’s “Ward Six”; Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilych”; James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” (everyone’s autobiography)."

"The lower imagination, the weaker, falls into the proliferation of images. My hope is someday to be able to figure out a connection between the work of monotheism-imagining and the work of story-imagining. Until now I have thought of these as enemies."

"To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination. I no longer think of imagination as a thing to be dreaded."

"The insight that the largest, deepest, widest imaginative faculty of all is what you need to be a monotheist teaches me that you simply cannot be a Jew if you repudiate the imagination."

"(What sustained you without publication during that period?) Belief. Not precisely self-belief, because that faltered profoundly again and again. Belief in Art, in Literature: I was a worshipper of Literature...I no longer believe in Literature, capital L, with the same fervor I used to. I’ve learned to respect living, perhaps. I think I have gotten over my fear of largeness as well, because I have gotten over my awe—my idolatrous awe. Literature is not all there is in the world, I now recognize. It is, I admit, still my all, but it isn’t the all. And that is a difference I can finally see."

"I read in order to write. I read out of obsession with writing...I read in order to find out what I need to know: To illuminate the riddle."

"One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language."

"It seems to me that more can be found about a writer in any single sentence in a work of fiction, say, than in five or ten full-scale biographies. Or interviews!"