Joyce Carol Oates

“but was this funny? was this funny? was this funny? why was this funny? why was Sugar Kane funny? why were men dressed as women funny? why were men made up as women funny? why were men staggering in high heels funny? why was Sugar Kane funny, was Sugar Kane the supreme female impersonator? was this funny? why was this funny? why is female funny? why were people going to laugh at Sugar Kane & fall in love with Sugar Kane? why, another time? why would Sugar Kane Kovalchick girl ukulelist be such a box office success in America? why dazzling-blond girl ukulelist alcoholic Sugar Kane Kovalchick a success? why Some Like It Hot a masterpiece? why Monroe's masterpiece? why Monroe's most commercial movie? why did they love her? why when her life was in shreds like clawed silk? why when her life was in pieces like smashed glass? why when her insides had bled out? why when her insides had been scooped out? why when she carried poison in her womb? why when her head was ringing with pain? her mouth stinging with red ants? why when everybody on the set of the film hated her? resented her? feared her? why when she was drowning before their eyes? I wanna be loved by you boop boopie do! why was Sugar Kane Kovalchick of Sweet Sue's Society Syncopaters so seductive? I wanna be kissed by nobody else but you I wanna! I wanna! I wanna be loved by you alone but why? why was Marilyn so funny? why did the world adore Marilyn? who despised herself? was that why? why did the world love Marilyn? why when Marilyn had killed her baby? why when Marilyn had killed her babies? why did the world want to fuck Marilyn? why did the world want to fuck fuck fuck Marilyn? why did the world want to jam itself to the bloody hilt like a great tumescent sword in Marilyn? was it a riddle? was it a warning? was it just another joke? I wanna be loved by you boop boopie do nobody else but you nobody else but you nobody else”

“The Playwright had long been fascinated by the strange mercurial personality of the Actor. What is "acting." and why do we respond to "great acting" as we do? We know that an actor is "acting" and yet - we wish to forget that an actor is "acting," and in the presence of talented actors we quickly do forget. This is a mystery, a riddle. How can we forget the actor "acts"? Is the actor "acting" on our behalf? Is the subtext of the actor's "acting" always and forever our own buried (and denied) "acting"?”

“For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.”

“Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.”

“Ohhhhh."A lush-bodied girl in the prime of her physical beauty. In an ivory georgette-crepe sundress with a halter top that gathers her breasts up in soft undulating folds of the fabric. She's standing with bare legs apart on a New York subway grating. Her blond head is thrown rapturously back as an updraft lifts her full, flaring skirt, exposing white cotton panties. White cotton! The ivory-crepe sundress is floating and filmy as magic. The dress is magic. Without the dress the girl would be female meat, raw and exposed.She's not thinking such a thought! Not her.She's an American girl healthy and clean as a Band-Aid. She's never had a soiled or a sulky thought. She's never had a melancholy thought. She's never had a savage thought. She's never had a desperate thought. She's never had an un-American thought. In the papery-thin sundress she's a nurse with tender hands. A nurse with luscious mouth. Sturdy thighs, bountiful breasts, tiny folds of baby fat at her armpits. She's laughing and squealing like a four year-old as another updraft lifts her skirt. Dimpled knees, a dancer's strong legs. This husky healthy girl. The shoulders, arms, breasts belong to a fully mature woman but the face is a girl's face. Shivering in New York City mid-summer as subway steam lifts her skirt like a lover's quickened breath."Oh! Ohhhhh."It's nighttime in Manhattan, Lexington Avenue at 51st Street. Yet the white-white lights exude the heat of midday. The goddess of love has been standing like this, legs apart, in spike-heeled white sandals so steep and so tight they've permanently disfigured her smallest toes, for hours. She's been squealing and laughing, her mouth aches. There's a gathering pool of darkness at the back of her head like tarry water. Her scalp and her pubis burn from the morning's peroxide applications. The Girl with No Name. The glaring-white lights focus upon her, upon her alone, blond squealing, blond laughter, blond Venus, blond insomnia, blond smooth-shaven legs apart and blond hands fluttering in a futile effort to keep her skirt from lifting to reveal white cotton American-girl panties and the shadow, just the shadow, of the bleached crotch."Ohhhhhh."Now she's hugging herself beneath her big bountiful breasts. Her eyelids fluttering. Between the legs, you can trust she's clean. She's not a dirty girl, nothing foreign or exotic. She's an American slash in the flesh. That emptiness. Guaranteed. She's been scooped out, drained clean, no scar tissue to interfere with your pleasure, and no odor. Especially no odor. The Girl with No Name, the girl with no memory. She has not lived long and she will not live long.”

“Men grow cold as girls grow oldAnd we all lose our charms in the end.How prettily Lorelei Lee sang these mordant lyrics!”

“Yet there was something gratifyingly real about being called a bitch, a whore, a blond tramp. Where so much was a dreamy haze, anything promising to be real was bracing.”

“Dear girl! Life is addictive. Yet we must live.”

“Know what 'celebrity' is kid? Being paid to bullshit the rest of your natural life.”

“That glass sliver in the heart. Amid a fluttery-delicious Benzedrine rush, virtually every remark made to you is freighted with destiny, a sweet-painful stab in the heart. And Benzedrine and champagne, what a combination! The Blond Actress was only just discovering what everybody else in Hollywood knew.”

“unless it was enough for these worshipers to bask in the knowledge that, though invisible to them and in every way inaccessible to them, the swarthy handsome Ex-Athlete and the beautiful Blond Actress might at that very moment be coupling like Shiva and Shakti, unmaking and making the Universe?”

“All actors are whores.They want only one thing: to seduce you.”

“In our household, which was essentially under an evil spell, my father 'Chaplin' was all the magic. A great man draws magic into himself, like reverse lightning. There's nothing to spare for anyone else.”

“Acting is the loneliest profession I know.”

“But so like Hollywood people, who played at the emotions they truly felt. Or maybe the emotions they truly felt could only be expressed in play?”

“An actress wants to be seen. An actress wants to be loved. By multitudes of people, not just one lone man.”

“There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You're dead, yet alive. There's no sensation so exquisite.”

“Her problem wasn't she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn't a blonde and she wasn't dumb.”

“As if whoever it was held that camera was her closest friend. Or maybe it was the camera that was her closest friend.”

“I'm nobody's daughter now. I'm through with that.”

“Bullshit! Li-ar! Your mother and father are dead like everybody else. Everybody is dead.”

“Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.”

“Erotic: meaning you're "desired."For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness.So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.”

“I would know of myself through the witnessing and naming of others. As Jesus in the Gospels is only seen and spoken of and recorded by others. I would know my existence and the value of that existence through others' eyes, which I believed I could trust as I could not trust my own.”

“And the thought consoled me, as it does now: everything you believe you have imagined is real. You have only to outlive it.”

“I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.”

“A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.”

“I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.”

“Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?”

“I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space- who else?”

“For the first time driving that day I could feel the motion of the Earth. The Earth rushing through the emptiness of space. Spinning on its axis but they say you don't feel it, you can't experience it. But to feel it is to be scared and happy at once and to know that nothing matters but that you do what you want to do and what you do you are. And I knew I was moving into the future. There is not PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or ever to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it. ”

“At such rare times you can feel the electrically charged neurons of the prefrontal brain realigning themselves like iron fillings drawn by a magnet. ”

“We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves,unable to see that here, now,this very moment is sacred;but once it’s gone –its value is incontestable.”

“A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?”

“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.”

“We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.”

“Close up she saw that Molina's eyes were beautiful and dark thik eye lashed the way Lisette's mother tried to make hers with a mascara brush. The skin beneath Molina's eyes were soft and bruised looking and on her throat were tiny dark moles. It did not seem right that a woman like Molina, who you could tell was a mother-her body was a mother's body for sure, wide hips-could be a cop;it did not seem right that this person was carrying a gun, in a holster attached to leather belt, and that she could use it, if she wanted to.”

“For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.”

“Whoever's reading this, if anyone is reading it: does it matter that our old selves are lost to us as surely as the past is lost, or is it enough to know yes we lived then, and we are living now, and the connection must be there? Like a river hundreds of miles long exists both at its source and at its mouth, simultaneously?”

“A daydreamer is prepared for most things.”

“Loretta folded her arms. She felt like a heroine in a movie, confronted by a jealous husband in a kitchen while outside the camera is aching to draw back and show a wonderland of adventures waiting for her—long, frantic rides on trains, landscapes of wounded soldiers, a lovely white desert across which a camel caravan draped voluptuously in veils moves slowly with a kind of mincing melancholy, the steamy jungles of India opening before British officers in white, young officers, the mysteries of English drawing-rooms cracking before the quick, humorless smirk of a wise young woman from America. . . .”

“Knowing now I would never be alone again never lonely again as in those years God allowed me to be thus as if He did not exist forcing onto me the bitter knowledge that He did not exist in truth or if He did His existence touched in no way upon my own.”

“That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.”

“My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.”

“The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day--a way of relating.”

“. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.”

“How crucial for us to rehearse the future, in words.Never to doubt that you will live to utter them.Never to doubt that you will tell your story.”

“It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing--how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are; because you've said them so many times, your 'principles,' your 'ideals'--and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.”

“She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.”

“If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?”