Joyce Carol Oates Quotes
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.
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.
