Joyce Carol Oates Quotes
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.
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.
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.
Warum man schreibt, ist eine Frage die sich der Schriftsteller, völlig versunken in seine Arbeit, nicht stellt. Theorien sind das Gebiet derer, die nicht handeln.
It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.
Legs was always proud even before FOXFIRE, that’s the primary fact about Legs Sadovsky: pride.
The distinction between "assistant" and intern" is a simple one: assistants are paid, interns are not.But of course interns are paid, in experience.
It had seemed to me an elegant nightmare concoction made by adults for adults, to further the aims and fantasies of adults, and what have children to do with such things?
He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.
A fear of the unknown: what was that called?Worse yet: a fear of the known.
Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don't know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you've been told, what the words suggest.
And remember: you must not overwork your body, or your soul. You must not enslave yourself, as you would not enslave any other person. You must be the custodian of your self.
On the way home Mary Lou said, "Some things are so sad you can't say them." But I pretended not to hear.
Because nothing between human beings is uncomplicated and there's no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them.
These are open secrets, so to speak. Of the kind we dare not articulate, for fear of wounding those close to us.
There are some secrets so toxic you can’t share. Especially if you love who it is you’d have to share with.
The gym cat appears to those who will die. He is our totem." This thought came to me a few weeks ago. I shared it with no one of course.
Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.
Be daring, take on anything. Don’t labor over little cameo works in which every word is to be perfect. Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.
A three-quarter moon, glowering bone, with a hint of something bruised, battered, scarred. The moon has endured more than anybody can know.
Like a turnip such a head could be blown away very easily. For where a man was weak, a woman has unmanned him. It would be a mercy to blow such a man away.
Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.” —
Only when men are connected to large universal goals are they really happy-and one result of their happiness is a rush of creative activity.
We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves unable to see that here now this very moment is sacred but once it's gone-its value is incontestable.
Hospital vigils inspire us to such nostalgia. Hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which the mind floats free, a frail balloon drifting into the sky as into infinity.
That I was sleeping at a time when my husband was dying is so horrible a thought, I can’t confront it.
She will speculate that she didn’t fully know her husband—this will give her leverage to seek him, to come to know him. It will keep her husband “alive” in her memory—elusive, teasing.
How exhausted I am suddenly!—though this has been Ray’s best day in the hospital so far, and we are feeling—almost—exhilarated.
The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!
The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his efforts, he believes in the future.
For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom.
It is utterly naive, futile, uninformed—to think that our species is exceptional. So designated to master the beasts of the Earth, as in the Book of Genesis!
I should say, one of the things about being a widow or a widower, you really, really need a sense of humor, because everything's going to fall apart.
I'm drawn to failure. I feel like I'm contending with it constantly in my own life.