C.F. Joyce Quotes
Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.
the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.
Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.
Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.
The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.
It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.
The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it won't last; nothing can guarantee it.
For politics is in its essence as Adams had said, the 'systematic organization of hatred': either you were organized or you were not.
It's always a challenge to discover the most effective first sentence, and the most effective final sentence, in a chapter for instance, and in the book as a whole.
There is the expectation that a younger generation has the opportunity to redeem the crimes and failings of their elders and would have the strength and idealism to do so.
When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.
I don't think that any 'ism' is higher than literature or art. So I'm a formalist. I greatly honor and respect the form of a work.
Often in gothic novels there's a large house, an estate, and it's symbolic of that culture. Usually it's sort of moldering or rotted or something, and sometimes it's a whole community.
... such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing.
There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time.
When I'm really involved or getting towards the end of a novel, I can write for up to ten hours a day. At those times, it's as though I'm writing a letter to someone I'm desperately in love with.
It's one of those secrets that's embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students.
To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box.
I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hardworking.
What is a family, after all, except memories? Haphazard and precious as the contents of a catch-all drawer in the kitchen.
And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness.
How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?
Where there must be a choice, a girl will choose Daddy. Even if you are Mommy, you concede that this must be so: you remember when you were a girl, too.
When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.
Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.
What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She'd become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.
Writing allows for fictitious voices - the voices of persons unlike myself - that might otherwise be muted.
I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs; otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in terms of the characters whom the voices express.
It is important for me to discover the ideal title, for without this title the story or novel isn't quite in focus.
Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.
Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process.
Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.
That is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand this?
Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.
the art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others.
There are boxers possessed of such remarkable intuition, such uncanny prescience, one would think they were somehow recalling their fights, not fighting them as we watch.
I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.
And what is 'art'? - a firestorm rushing through Time, arising from no visible source and conforming to no principles of logic or causality.