Quote

Nothing comes of so many things, if you have patience.

Joyce Carol Oates

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

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
Patience
Comes
Nothing
Many
Things

More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

Image
On the elusive gift of blending austerity of craft with elasticity of allure.
Joyce Carol Oates
Image
She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.
Joyce Carol Oates
Image
The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.
Joyce Carol Oates
Image
You cultivate the subconscious by meditation, by sitting in silence and by not trying to control your thoughts. Then go someplace where you haven't been before, or go for a walk, a run, and look for signs of grace-an epiphany, something that comes to you.
Joyce Carol Oates
Image
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
Image
Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.
Joyce Carol Oates
Image
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.
Joyce Carol Oates
Image
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.
Joyce Carol Oates
Image
I work very slowly. It's like building a ladder, where you're building your own ladder rung by rung, and you're climbing the ladder. It's not the best way to build a ladder, but I don't know any other way.
Joyce Carol Oates
Image
For some reason, voters can be brainwashed, and they vote sometimes against their own best interests, let alone voting against the interests of people who need them, like people who are disenfranchised and people who are poor and so forth.
Joyce Carol Oates
Image
I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.
Joyce Carol Oates
Image
What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.
Joyce Carol Oates
Image
There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it's gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.
Joyce Carol Oates
Image
I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.
Joyce Carol Oates
Image
These novels [Zombie, My Sister, My Love] are so special to me. [I don't expect that they will have nearly the same significance to anyone else.] They represent a kind of fiction I would love to pursue more or less constantly, but dare not.
Joyce Carol Oates
Image
Why the need, rising in some very nearly to the level of compulsion, to verify experience by way of language?-to scrupulously record and preserve the very passing of Time?
Joyce Carol Oates
Image
Primarily, 'Black Girl/White Girl' is the story of two very different, yet somehow 'fated' girls for Genna, her 'friendship' with Minette is the most haunting of her life, though it is one-sided and ends in tragedy.
Joyce Carol Oates
Image
She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, Why are you trying to starve yourself? To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all.
Joyce Carol Oates
Image
Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.
Joyce Carol Oates
Image
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