M. Waldman Quotes & Sayings

Work less than you think you should. It took me a while to realise there was a point each day when my creativity ran out and I was just producing words - usually lousy ones - for their own sake. And nap: it helps to refresh the brain, at least mine. — Amy Waldman

When I got back to NY had the opportunity to work with the beginning years of the poetry project which was founded with money from the OEO under Lyndon Johnson to work with alienated youth on the lower East side. This was extraordinary, to be able to help then to create a culture that would capture the energy that I felt at Berkley. — Anne Waldman

While researching 'The Submission,' I went to a protest against the Ground Zero mosque in New York when I was about to give birth to twins. It was about 100 degrees. People thought I was very dedicated. — Amy Waldman

Where are we?" Ni asked.
"This is my work place and the center of
Universe as well." Simone said.
"Do you mean the tower is in the center of Universe?" Ni asked
"I mean that we are both in space and inside the tower at the same time."
"Why is it so dark here?" Ni asked.
"At the beginning, it is always dark." Simone replied, "Then everything comes into existence little by little.
Even Light is born out of Darkness. — Leora Cika Waldman

I'm kind of a mash-up of taste - Graham Greene and Jane Austen; W.G. Sebald and Alice Munro. — Amy Waldman

I was raised with a sense of democratic vistas and egalitarianism. — Anne Waldman

My first therapist was a psychiatric resident assigned to me by University Health Services when I was a third-year law student. I was looking for help dealing with a breakup that at the time felt tragic but that now seems like that moment when you look up from your phone just in time to avoid being plowed down by a city bus. — Ayelet Waldman

Growing up in the fifties, having to wear a dog tag, having to take shelter in a bomb shelter. That turned me toward the road, I did not want to live in fear of that, I was gong to work somehow against what that vision was, and what that horror was. It was poetry, art, music. — Anne Waldman

I don't demonize the downside. As we've seen in Egypt and Tahrir square and other recent event, the adhesiveness through [technology] kinds of communication is extraordinary. Interesting times we live in. — Anne Waldman

I'm sure a lot of it is my fault," he said. He smiled ruefully. "And by a lot, I mean all."
"Ah, the self-deprecating dude routine," Hannah said. " 'What a lovable fuck-up I am.' The annoying thing is that it makes you look good, but it doesn't get me anything. — Adelle Waldman

I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over its powerful hold on me ever since. — Amy Waldman

I took my vow to poetry; this is where I'm going to be. These are my people; this is my tribe. This is where I'm going to put my energy. — Anne Waldman

I think anything that gets people outside [is good] - I'm a big supporter of public parks and public spaces. — Anne Waldman

History is the history of human behavior, and human behavior is the raw material of fiction. Most people recognize that novelists do research to get the facts right - how a glove factory works, for example, or how courtesans in imperial Japan dressed. — Amy Waldman

Nate hated, really hated, being told he thought too much. Jason wasn't the only one who said it: hippie-dippie types who romanticize the natural and the "intuitive" also prefer feeling to thought. But not thinking was a way of giving oneself license to be a dick. — Adelle Waldman

When I look at my life there are these streams, these things that have continuity from the fifties to now. — Anne Waldman

Before I was married, I didn't consider my failure to manage even basic hand tools a feminist inadequacy. I thought it had more to do with being Jewish. The Jews I knew growing up didn't do 'do-it-yourself.' When my father needed to hammer something he generally used his shoe, and the only real tool he owned was a pair of needle-nose pliers. — Ayelet Waldman

Another parent's different approach raises the possibility that you've made a mistake with your child. We simply can't tolerate that because we fear that any mistake, no matter how minor, could have devastating consequences. So we proclaim the superiority of our own choices. We've lost sight of the fact that people have preferences. — Ayelet Waldman

I had parents who were attentive to what was going on politically. There was the Greek connection, a sense of a larger world. People coming in from abroad. There was a sense of community around ideas: a discourse and an adhesiveness which is my favorite word from [Walt] Whitman. — Anne Waldman

These days, when people compete for ever more imaginative ways to make themselves stand out, when all of life is one big exhibition and if it's not on Facebook and Twitter it's like it never happened, I suppose many people would enjoy standing out. But that's because they don't have to stand out. Standing out is their luxury, not their necessity. — Rose Waldman

Like the protagonist of her 2006 novel, 'Love and Other Impossible Pursuits,' Ayelet Waldman is a Jewish redhead who attended Harvard Law School and is madly in love with her husband. But the obvious similarities end there. — Katie Hafner

The first inkling my husband had that I was thinking about suicide was when he checked my blog. — Ayelet Waldman

I think in the wake of 9/11, like a lot of Americans, you know, we were all very traumatized by the attacks, traumatized in a totally different way by some of what happened afterward in response. And I think there have been these questions hovering in the past decade of, what kind of country are we? Who are we? — Amy Waldman

How many straight men maintain inappropriately intimate relationships with their mothers? How many shop with them? I want a gay son. People laugh, but they assume I'm kidding. I'm not. — Ayelet Waldman

The biggest challenge for any craft person or artist is to accept the constraints of their medium and make something beautiful despite them. That's kind of fun, actually. — Ayelet Waldman

Let's all commit ourselves to the basic civility of minding our own business. Failing that, let's go back to a time when we were nasty and judgmental, but only behind one another's backs. — Ayelet Waldman

Aborting my baby is the most serious of the many maternal crimes I tally in my head when I am at my lowest, when the Bad Mother label seems to fit best. Rocketship was my baby. And I killed him. — Ayelet Waldman

Why is it that loving something provides such little protection from betrayal? — Ayelet Waldman

I'm concerned about the overuse of spectacular places. And there's no real wilderness left and so there's a heartbreak there. You can go anywhere and be rescued through your cell phone and have some helicopter drop down. — Anne Waldman

I'm curious about other universes, and nonhuman elementals. For me it's still a very lively ethos. It's a kind of practice. It's an ethos that is very sustaining. — Anne Waldman

Even if i'm setting myself up for failure, I think it's worth trying to be a mother who delights in who her children are, in their knock-knock jokes and earnest questions. A mother who spends less time obseessing about what will happen, or what has happened, and more time reveling in what is. A mother who doesn't fret over failings and slights, who realizes her worries and anxieties are just thoughts, the continuous chattering and judgement of a too busy mind. A mother who doesn't worry so much about being bad or good but just recognizes that she's both, and neither. A mother who does her best, and for whom that is good enough, even if, in the end, her best turns out to be, simply, not bad. — Ayelet Waldman

If I smashed the traditions it was because I knew no traditions. I'm the girl with the unquenchable thirst. — Anne Waldman

I've multiplied, I'm 2.
He was part of me
he came out of me,
he took a part of me
He took me apart.
I'm 2, he's my art,
no, he's separate.
He art one. I'm not
done & I'm still one.
I sing of my son. I've
multiplied. My heart's
in 2, half to him & half
to you,
who are also a part
of him, & you & he
& I make trio of
kind congruity. — Anne Waldman

Yes, I have four children. Four children with whom I spend a good part of every day: bathing them, combing their hair, sitting with them while they do their homework, holding them while they weep their tragic tears. But I'm not in love with any of them. I am in love with my husband. — Ayelet Waldman

As a younger person you can come in through many, many gateways. It's like some huge Mandela. You can enter into this and get refreshed. — Anne Waldman

Myths, by their definition, involve transformations, struggles through various worlds or layers of reality and of obscuration. — Anne Waldman

It was really hard coming to terms with the Nazi history. Then in my twenties I was traveling to Germany. There was a lot of poetry activity and some of my first readings abroad and trying to relate with people my own age there and what they were discovering and learning had to examine in terms of their backgrounds. Then so many of my friends had family who had either perished in the holocaust or survived in the holocaust. It was very palpable. — Anne Waldman

You really felt a radical shift in the advance of a poetics that had really been engendered by [Walt] Whitman. This was very exciting. I wanted to work in this environment. — Anne Waldman

Where would the memoir be without bipolar writers? I mean, that's what - that whole oversharing thing is really a very clear symptom of bipolar disorder. And I'm not saying that every, you know, I'm not accusing every memoirist of being bipolar. But I think in a way it's kind of a gift. — Ayelet Waldman

I'm sure there are people who survive tragedy without humor, but I've never met any of them. Nor would I be particularly interested in writing about them if I did meet them. — Ayelet Waldman

If producing a regular column is living out loud, then keeping a daily blog is living at the top of your lungs. For a couple of months there, I was shrieking like a banshee. — Ayelet Waldman

While he was alive Peter Jennings did considerable damage to the cause of civilization and human deceny [sic] by his sympathy for Jew-hating terrorists and their supporters. — Paul Waldman

My own husband was divorced when we met, but without kids. I don't know what I would have done if he'd had them. I got the message very early on that the worst mistake a woman can make is marrying a man with children. — Ayelet Waldman

Jacob wore a tetchy air of mild resentment that Paul couldn't begin to understand. He was forty and his father was bankrolling him; what could he possibly feel aggrieved about? He pushed unrealized potential before him like a baby carriage. — Amy Waldman

Eden, paradise - all the best gardens are imaginary. — Amy Waldman

A lot of my life has involved with helping create cultures that have as their basis this vision of the sharing, the partaking of a certain ethos together. — Anne Waldman

The text for me is the musical score. I'm the instrument. My voice is the instrument. My voice is articulating the sounds which are coming through the imaginings and visitations in my head, and I'm making these sounds but I've selected them from an ocean of sound. — Anne Waldman

I invoke that sense of the particulars of that kind of literal travel and what that has meant historically in terms of diasporas, in terms of the migrations of immigrants coming to this [U.S.] country with a real vision of finding the promised land. — Anne Waldman

No one begs you to be a poet or write a 1000-page poem. You have to be fueled by a drive, a conviction - a need, a necessity, a vision that is so pressing that it has no other outlet but through you. That doesn't mean that you are unconscious or in trance, but there can be moments like that. — Anne Waldman

Idea that all the beats are wildly liberal and progressive is ridiculous. You have people thinking for themselves and having certain affinities because of their upbringing and who their family are, their own people who were close to them who fought in these wars and so on. It's complicated. But they had that ability to continue the conversation. — Anne Waldman

I was not ever hitchhiking alone. I've done solo train trips but I've never driven myself alone. — Anne Waldman

But I really feel strongly that our kids do way too much homework. The research is on my side. It's easy to make a fuss when you're right. That can be the tagline of my life: 'It's Easy To Make A Fuss When You're Right.' — Ayelet Waldman

People expect girls from good middle-class families to be smart
but what they mean by smart for a girl is to have nice handwriting and a neat locker and to do her homework on time. They don't expect ideas or much in the way of real thought. — Adelle Waldman

It wasn't government that gave us nearly 50 million uninsured Americans and denials for pre-existing conditions. It wasn't government that gave us the yearly and lifetime caps on insurance coverage that have sent so many people into bankruptcy when they've faced a serious illness or accident. It wasn't government that gave us a system in which the gap between what we spend and what we get is so enormous. It was the free market. — Paul Waldman

I used to refer to myself as a 'theoretical anorexic,' just as crazy when it came to body image, but saved by a lack of self-discipline. My daughters do everything better than I do - they're smarter, more beautiful, happier. What if they end up better at anorexia, too? — Ayelet Waldman

Most writers spend their lives standing a little apart from the crowd, watching and listening and hoping to catch that tiny hint of despair, that sliver of malice, that makes them think, 'Aha, here is the story.' — Ayelet Waldman

My parents are aging and there are difficult issues. It's strange to have children at the beginning of life and parents nearing the end. — Amy Waldman

I think of my father born in this very small, limited situation and then coming out of that. Many people have this story. — Anne Waldman

And as journalists we look for differences - differences between countries, cultures, classes, and communities. We're very sensitized to difference, but it's much harder to write about similarities across countries, cultures, classes, and communities. — Amy Waldman

Fabricating reality was criminal; editing it, commonplace. — Amy Waldman