Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.
Joyce Carol Oates
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
Joyce Carol Oates
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: June 16
Author
Autobiographer
Diarist
Essayist
Novelist
Playwright
Poet
Professor
Screenwriter
University Teacher
Writer
Lockport
New York
Dream
Writing
Dreaming
Thinking
Novels
Page
Pages
Begin
Meditation
Novel
More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
...failure is a human condition, not victory over odds for each Hellen Keller who triumphs, there are tens of millions who fail, mute and deaf and insensate as vegetables tossed upon a vast garbage pile to rot.
Joyce Carol Oates
Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process.
Joyce Carol Oates
When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.
Joyce Carol Oates
She thought that this man was her savior, that he had come to her at a time in her life when her life demanded completion, an end, a permanent fixing of all that was troubled and shifting and deadly. And yet it was absurd to think this. No person could save another. So she drew back from him and released him.
Joyce Carol Oates
Not even the most devastating truth can be told it must be evoked.
Joyce Carol Oates
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.
Joyce Carol Oates
There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You're dead, yet alive. There's no sensation so exquisite.
Joyce Carol Oates
Mark Twain was very unhappy with himself for various reasons. He was very unhappy with America of this time. He thought it was terrible we had no anti-lynching laws, and he was also a feminist, and he was also very concerned with anti-Semitism. He was a good man, but he was hard on himself.
Joyce Carol Oates
My writing is often a way of 'bearing witness' for others who lack the education and the opportunity to tell their own stories, so I hope that my writing won't be affected too much by my personal life.
Joyce Carol Oates
The suicide does not play the game, does not observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and leaves the other guests painfully uncomfortable.
Joyce Carol Oates
A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.
Joyce Carol Oates
Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.
Joyce Carol Oates
If my favorite, most comfortable place is by our fireplace in cold weather, expedient places are on an airplane, in a waiting room or even waiting in line frequently these days, while on the phone having been 'put on hold.'
Joyce Carol Oates
It's hard to say how we compare to other people. We each inhabit our own personalities. I have often felt that I'm a very neutral being and that I have almost no personality. I'm drawn to writing partly because I'm fascinated by the mimetic process.
Joyce Carol Oates
[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.
Joyce Carol Oates
Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.
Joyce Carol Oates
The only people who claim that money is not important are people who have enough money so that they are relieved of the ugly burden of thinking about it.
Joyce Carol Oates
The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.
Joyce Carol Oates
Every scar in my face is worth it.
Joyce Carol Oates
My life is a very interior and solitary life. I tend not to care that much about external things.
Joyce Carol Oates
