“When a man owns a lion, a lion owns a man.”

– Guy Davenport

“Punk rock should mean freedom, liking and accepting everything you like and playing anything you want, as sloppy as you want… as long as it’s good and has passion.”

1. Never settle for the easy story. Reach for the hard one if that’s what’s real. Do this, however reluctant the world may be to hear what you have to say.

2. Avoid obvious, predictable choices. You may join the chorus, of course. You may even make a buck or two if you add your voice to those already singing the song we’ve all heard. (In my case, this would include accusations that I “exploited a great man who only wanted his privacy,” that I “sold love letters,” that I have made “a cottage industry” of hitching my little cart to Salinger’s freight train.)

But before you allow yourself these or any other easy assumptions: ask your own questions. In my case, here’s one: Is it the obligation of any human being to protect the embarrassing secrets of some other individual of greater power and influence, simply because he tells her so?

3. Do your research. Before you determine that a person is somehow choosing to promote herself and her work by her association with some vastly more significant individual, find out what she may have been doing for the last forty-one years. In my case, were you to do your research, you might discover that in addition to publishing thirteen books, I’ve worked with a few thousand writing students, lent my services to causes I believe in, raised some children, fought and helped to defeat a nuclear waste dump in my state, to name a few pastimes.

I’ve had the usual number of screw-ups and disasters too, mind you. About which I have written and spoken freely.

4. Break rules. Question authority. (Even—god forbid—the authority of a Famous Writer. )

If a person tells you “never talk about this,” consider why he or she might demand this of you. And whether in fact you owe that person your silence and protection. History is filled with rule-breakers. I call many of these individuals my heroes.

5. Be brave. Never allow yourself to consider, as you write, what people will say about you, or how unpopular your words may make you. Tell the truth, as you see it. This goes beyond reporting the facts with accuracy, by the way. This starts with choosing authentic language. But most of all, authentic ideas. As opposed to the old familiar recycled ones. You will be a better writer for this, I promise you. You will most certainly become a more powerful person.
—Joyce Maynard, via Medium

“Bethany works 16-hour days and is on call all the time and thus has never married. She wants a baby and for whatever reason wants to personally give birth to that baby and refuses to have one-night stands or pocket hospital sperm samples, so her biological clock is deafening. Not like yours, dear. Your fertility is like a pocket watch swaddled in cotton, drawn up in a velvet pouch, and tucked inside a Pringles can. But Bethany’s! Sometimes I walk past the Fifth Avenue Synagogue and worry a bomb is about to go off. I imagine my upper torso landing in a gyro cart. And the contents of my purse laid out for all to see. Then I realize it’s not anxiety hounding me, it’s Bethany’s biological clock. It ticks so loud, I’m amazed Mount Sinai isn’t evacuated on a daily basis. Oh, Bethany, don’t make that face. You know it’s true.”
—Helen Ellis

“I start with the idea of constructing a treehouse and end with a skyscraper made of wood.”
—Mailer.

Paris Review: But what about your literary ambitions in terms of subject matter and length?
Cynthia Ozick: I see it as a simple matter of choosing a subject, or having the subject choose itself, and letting the subject dictate the length. It’s not my “ambition” that dictates the size of the enterprise. I am not interested in ego, if that’s what this question is about. “The Pagan Rabbi,” for instance, a short story written so long ago, touches on a large theme: the aesthetic versus the moral commitment. Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space—for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare! Multum in parvo. I am not avoiding length these days—not consciously. But perhaps there’s some truth in the speculation that I may be living my life backwards! Doing the short forms now, having begun with a Great Work, a long ambitious “modernist” novel of the old swollen kind.

PR: Can one write and avoid ambition?
CO: One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language. And the power of language, it seems to me, is the only kind of power a writer is entitled to.

PR: But is writing idolatry?
CO: Until quite recently I held a rather conventional view about all this. I thought of the imagination as what its name suggests, as image-making, and I thought of the writer’s undertaking as a sovereignty set up in competition with the sovereignty of—well, the Creator of the Universe. I thought of imagination as that which sets up idols, as a rival of monotheism. I’ve since reconsidered this view. I now see that the idol-making capacity of imagination is its lower form, and that one cannot be a monotheist without putting the imagination under the greatest pressure of all. To imagine the unimaginable is the highest use of the imagination. I no longer think of imagination as a thing to be dreaded. Once you come to regard imagination as ineluctably linked with monotheism, you can no longer think of imagination as competing with monotheism. Only a very strong imagination can rise to the idea of a noncorporeal God. 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.
-Oh, fuck: “Cynthia Ozick, The Art of Fiction No. 95”