Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense.
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
Memories
Sense
Writing
Much
Unresolved
Something
Energized
Like
Ghosts
Psychological
Ghost
More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
I do what I want to do. It was a brash statement of(her)girlhood. Now she was an adult, the boast seemed quaint. For rarely do you know what you want. Even after you've done it you can't say clearly if that was what you'd wanted or just something that happened to you, like weather.
Joyce Carol Oates
I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.
Joyce Carol Oates
Most people think that a widow is inhabiting some elegiac world of - it's like Mozart's 'Requiem Mass.' You know, it's very beautiful and elevated thoughts and some measure of dignity. I didn't have that experience at all. I had one pratfall after another.
Joyce Carol Oates
See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be
Joyce Carol Oates
If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.
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
All actors are whores. They want only one thing: to seduce you.
Joyce Carol Oates
My nature is orderly and observant and scrupulous and deeply introverted.
Joyce Carol Oates
The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct
Joyce Carol Oates
The best revenge is living well without you.
Joyce Carol Oates
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.
Joyce Carol Oates
Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.
Joyce Carol Oates
The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to overcome doubt.
Joyce Carol Oates
Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art.
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
These are the moments for which we live.
Joyce Carol Oates
I write so much because my cat sits on my lap. She purrs so I don't want to get up. She's so much more calming than my husband.
Joyce Carol Oates
It's always a challenge to discover the most effective first sentence, and the most effective final sentence, in a chapter for instance, and in the book as a whole.
Joyce Carol Oates
Dear girl! Life is addictive. Yet we must live.
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
