C.F. Joyce Quotes
Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real life is a disappointment. That's why we have art.
Childhood is the province of the imagination and when I immerse myself in it, I re-create it as it was, as it could have been, as I wanted - and didn't want - it to be.
I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.
At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it.
I have so many favorite writers, it's very hard to select a few... of classic writers, I have always admired Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau.
I have read on a Kindle. But the Kindle we had only worked for about eight months then it stopped working. You don't have to get books repaired.
You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.
Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really experience a text until you've taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.
Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?If it were not for language, could we lie?
After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.
Early publication can be a dubious blessing: we all know writers who would give anything not to have published their first book, and go about trying to buy up all existing copies.
Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.
A lawyer is basically a mouth, like a shark is a mouth attached to a long gut. The business of lawyers is to talk, to interrupt one another, and to devour each other if possible.
To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child, the whole tradition is lost.
Princeton is quite integrated. Women are professors at Princeton. Women are students at Princeton. That began in the 1970s.
How lawyers make work for one another! You're all priests, worshipping the same god. No wonder you adore one another.
For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.
One man's insanity is another man's genius; someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity.
Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.
Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.
Who is to blame for this most recent of sports disgraces in America? The culture that flings young athletes like Tyson up out of obscurity, makes millionaires of them and watches them self-destruct?
Society is the picnic certain individuals leave early, the party they fail to enjoy, the musical comedy they find not worth the price of admission.
Betrayal is the deepest wound. Betrayal is what remains of love, when love has gone.
Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.
In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.
Why should I want what's good for me?' Beatrice asked him, smiling. 'Is that what you want for yourself - only what's good for you?
Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?
I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love I love I love I love but you do not.
Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard.
To love life for some men is to love fighting, for fighting, and not love, is seen as man's deepest passion.
Why the need, rising in some very nearly to the level of compulsion, to verify experience by way of language?-to scrupulously record and preserve the very passing of Time?
Just as our historical beginnings are utterly mysterious-why are we born? why when and as we are?-so too are the beginnings of works of art and of "artists.
The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.