C.F. Joyce Quotes

To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.

Ambitious, absorbing, and poignantly moving.

You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.

I am always reading or thinking about reading.

Yet the fact had no consciousness of itself except through me.

Probably nothing serious or worthwhile can be accomplished without one's willingness to be alone for sustained periods of time, which is not to say that one must live alone, obsessively.

The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.

Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?

When you give up struggle, there's a kind of love.

Every scar in my face is worth it.

If I try to summon back his face, the sound of his voice, and the sensation in my stomach like a key turning in a lock when he touched me, I lose everything.

I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.

If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.

Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.

Love is an indescribable sensation - perhaps a conviction, a sense of certitude.

Most people who are writers go through periods when they can't write.

Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.

The body can't distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.

Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.

Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.

A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.

I am what would be called a 'mainstream feminist,' not a radical feminist.

I could never take the idea of religion very seriously.

celebrate while you can

From Mother you will inherit the belief that you can journey to your fate, there's a place to be located on a map that's destiny. If only you can get there. If it isn't too late. If no one stops you.

In a sense, I may not consciously know what I'm doing. I feel that I'm telling a story. I'm a kind of medium by which something is transmitted.

I've never given up. I've always kept going. I don't feel that I could afford to give up. That would be the beginning of the end.

I think what distresses me most in my life is that I have so many ideas I consider exciting ideas that I will never live to execute because it takes me so long to execute.

I don't know whether I am different from other people. Perhaps I am. Perhaps no one has a personality, and people are inventing themselves in the context in which they find themselves.

I tend to think in dramatic terms. In life, there may be an actual drama, but it would be the fictionalized, imagined drama that engaged me.

It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to write, however entirely different one's writing will be.

My first love was reading, which inspired me to write.

I feel a terrible loss when I (eventually must) complete a work of fiction.

Long ago I'd said that I am "fascinated by the phantasmagoria of human personality" - this is perhaps even truer now than years ago.

"Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

To choose the ideal voice for a character is to give a character an ardent and vivid life, to allow him or her to speak, rather than speaking for them, in an older style of omniscient narration.

Shakespeare would seem to have been a person for whom the human voice/personality in all its splendid idiosyncrasy was absolutely enthralling.

Sometimes I stumble upon a wonderfully irresistible to me voice, unexpectedly.

Before I undertake a lengthy project, I have usually given much thought to it over a period of years. My files are filled with likely subjects - which perhaps, one day, I will develop.

The will is never free - it is always attached to an object, a purpose. It is simply the engine in the car - it can't steer

For the essential thing about the work of art is that it is work, and very hard work too.

Something you have to make...It's all work, work.

Old men when they begin to hear the last trumpet, on the morning breeze, often have a kind of absent-minded smile; like people listening. And their smiles are just politeness.

I had come at last and my heart was beating again strongly to a heart that could not know despair because it forgot itself in the duty of its love.

Throughout the play everything possible was done to show the virtue, innocence and helplessness of the poor, and the abandoned cruelty, the heartless self-indulgence of the rich.

Life would die without poets, and democracy must have its spellbinders.

Shirley MacLaine once said that she didn't want to be a big star, just a long star. That's what I want too.

Does it bother me that I'm attached to 'Three's Company' 30 years after? Not at all. All we were trying to do was be funny. How can I complain? That's all I wanted to do.

When you decide you're going to join a project, it's all about the gift you're giving the audience.

I started on the stage when I was 13 and I consider the stage my home.