Sublime

I like writing that is unsummarizable, a kernel that cannot be condensed, that must be uttered exactly as it is.

It isn’t so much that geniuses make it look easy; it’s that they make it look fast.

I don’t love writing; I love having a problem I believe I might someday write my way out of.

She may agree with the poet Mary Oliver that “creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration. . . . It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching,” or with Gertrude Stein, who warned, “It takes a lot of time to be a genius, you have to sit around so much doing nothing, really doing nothing.”

Tillie Olsen wrote: “In the twenty years I bore and reared my children . . . the simplest circumstances for creation did not exist.” It was a physical problem, a time problem; it was also a question of selfhood. “The obligation to be physically attractive and patient and nurturing and docile and sensitive and deferential . . . contradicts and must