Joyce Carol Oates Quotes - Page 4

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No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

My life is a very interior and solitary life. I tend not to care that much about external things.

Art is about freedom of expression, and should not be molded to fit any propaganda or lofty ideal.

To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box.

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.

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

The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.

Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard.

In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

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

Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

One man's insanity is another man's genius; someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity.

The most common misperception about me is that I write fast. I just write often. Every hour that I can.

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.

People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.

Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse.

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

An actress wants to be seen. An actress wants to be loved. By multitudes of people, not just one lone man.

Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense.

Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.

Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.

Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.

Writing allows for fictitious voices - the voices of persons unlike myself - that might otherwise be muted.

To love life for some men is to love fighting, for fighting, and not love, is seen as man's deepest passion.

All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later.

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.

Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?If it were not for language, could we lie?

He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.

Each genre exerts a considerable spell, as a kind of "form" to be filled, as a Shakespearean sonnet is filled.

The mysteries of the female sex! We men can never hope to fathom your depths, but only try not to drown in them.

One of the large consolations for experiencing anything unpleasant is the knowledge that one can communicate it.

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

... such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing.

I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.

When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.

Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.

Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.

Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.

The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct

It is important for me to discover the ideal title, for without this title the story or novel isn't quite in focus.

Loneliness is dangerous ... because if aloneness does not lead to God, it leads to the devil. It leads to the self.

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?

In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolved

For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.

You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.

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