When You Are Writing Literary Writing, You

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.

I Can't Imagine A Mental Life, A Spiritual Existence, Not Inextricably Bound Up With Language Of A Formal, Mediated Nature. Telling Stories, Choosing An Appropriate Language With Which To Tell The Story: This Seems To Me Quintessentially Human, One Of The Great Adventures Of Our Species.

How Does The Poet Transform His Banal Thoughts (are Not Most Thoughts Banal?) Into Such Stunning Forms, Into Beauty?

The Television Screen, So Unlike The Movie Screen, Sharply Reduced Human Beings, Revealed Them As Small, Trivial, Flat, In Two Banal Dimensions, Drained Of Color. Wasn't There Something Reassuring About It! -- That Human Beings Were In Fact Merely Images Of A Kind Registered In One Another's Eyes And Brains, Phenomena Composed Of Microscopic Flickering Dots Like Atoms. They Were Atoms -- Nothing More. A Quick Switch Of The Dial And They Disappeared And Who Could Lament The Loss?

Like Most People, I Can Be Very Easily Hurt.