Top 468 Quotes & Sayings by Joyce Carol Oates - Page 3

I am what would be called a 'mainstream feminist,' not a radical feminist.

I compose most of my tweets with care, as if they were aphorisms - they are not usually dashed-off. Sometimes I'm surprised by the high, poetic quality of Twitter - it lends itself to a surreal sort of self-expression.

I don't think I'm morbid by nature. Serious writers have always written about serious subjects. Lighthearted material doesn't appeal to me, and I don't read it. I think I'm a realist, with a realistic sensibility of history and the tragedy of history.

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

Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.

I've always been interested in writing about people, including young children who are not able to speak for themselves. As in my novel 'Black Water,' I provide a voice for someone who has died and can't speak for herself.

In 'We Were the Mulvaneys,' animals are almost as important as people. I wanted to show the tenderness in our relationships with cats, dogs, and horses. Especially cats.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

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.

To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.

I think whenever we think of our hometowns, we tend to think of very specific people: with whom you rode on the school bus, who was your next door neighbor you were playing with, who your girlfriend was. It's always something very specific.

It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.

I have so many favorite writers, it's very hard to select a few... of classic writers, I have always admired Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau.

I write in longhand and assemble lots of notes, and then I try to collate them into a coherent chronology. It's like groping along in the dark. I like writing and find it challenging, but I don't find it easy.

When I wrote 'We Were The Mulvaneys,' I was just old enough to look back upon my own family life and the lies of certain individuals close to me, with the detachment of time. I wanted to tell the truth about secrets: How much pain they give, yet how much relief, even happiness we may feel when at last the motive for secrecy has passed.

I think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let other people speak... to travel... to experience the world. And memorialize it.

Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.

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.

Art is the highest expression of the human spirit.

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

Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.

I never change, I simply become more myself.

The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.

I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.

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.

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

Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.

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

Ultimately, we measure ourselves against our own ideas of idealism and perfection, and we don't always come very close to them.

The act of sending a letter is an act of generosity, even if, in retrospect, it might seem reckless. Why regret one's generosity? Why regret one's impulsiveness, one's misjudgment of others? The inevitable discovery that someone is selling letters you'd written in trust is simply to discover an obvious human truth: there are those who don't cherish us as we'd cherished them, and had wished to be cherished by them.

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

My writing is full of lives I might have led.

The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.

It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we really are.

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

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

Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.

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

The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.

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.

The regional voice is the universal voice.

Tragedy is the highest form of art.

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

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

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.

Evil isn't a cosmological riddle, only just selfish human behavior.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.

There is nothing "ordinary" about reality.

Much in our lives is chance.

Near the point of impact, time acelerates to the speed of light.

Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.

It's a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living--we who have survived--understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead. At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices, You will not forget me -- will you? How can you forget me? I have no one but you.

Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.

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.