A Quote by Joyce Carol Oates

Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed. — © Joyce Carol Oates
Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.
I think when you get to export your creative impulse into something, it kind of lessens that busy energy that can be so confrontational and pissy.
When we look at the arts and letters in America, especially if we look at poetry, and poetry set to music, this dialogue, we have this very powerful beautiful, eclectic, diary, or narration of being in America, being American, participating in America, becoming more of America and also as an American, the American creative spirit, which is quite interesting. Our composers and poets have spent more time writing and thinking and speaking out of what it means to be a composer or poet as well as to be an American, or a composer or poet In America; both relationships.
To be different is a negative motive, and no creative thought or created thing grows out of a negative impulse. A negative impulse is always frustrating. And to be different means ‘not like this’ and ‘not like that.’ And the ‘not like’—that’s why postmodernism, with the prefix of ‘post,’ couldn’t work. No negative impulse can work, can produce any happy creation. Only a positive one.
One of man's greatest failings is that he looks almost always for an excuse, in the misfortune that befalls him through his own fault, before looking for a remedy-which means he often finds the remedy too late.
The State not seldom tolerates a comparatively great evil to keep out millions of lesser ills and inconveniences which otherwise would be inevitable and without remedy.
I try and keep busy with something, but I also give myself permission to be busy with something that is creative and rewarding, not just the errands to the dry cleaner.
Managing the creative process means selecting the best people and then letting them do their work. That means nurturing. It also means, from time to time, creating drama - even uncertainty - so that the creative environment has an edge to it, a charge, and does not run out of steam.
We are made for action, and activity is the sovereign remedy for all physical ills.
Science is the greatest creative impulse of our time. It dominates the intellectual scene and forms our lives, not only in the material things which it has given us, but also in that it guides our spirit.
The moment of creative impulse is what an artist gives you. You look at a Pollock, and it can't give you the tools to do a painting like that yourself, but in doing the work, Pollock shares with you the moment of creative impulse that drove him to do that work.
I believe that the creative impulse is natural in all human beings, and that it is particularly powerful in children unless it is suppressed. Consequently, one is behaving normally and instinctively and healthily when one is creating - literature, art, music, or whatever. An excellent cook is also creative! I am disturbed that a natural human inclination [creative work] should, by some Freudian turn of phrase, be considered compulsive - perhaps even pathological. To me this is a complete misreading of the human enterprise. One should also enjoy one's work, and look forward to it daily.
All the ills from which America suffers can be traced to the teaching of evolution.
Love is a many-sided sacrifice; it means thoughtfulness for others; it means putting their good before self-gratification. Love is impulse, no doubt, but true love is impulse wisely directed.
This paranoid Islam, which blames outsider, 'infidels', for all the ills of Muslim societies, and whose proposed remedy is the closing of those societies to the rival project of modernity, is presently the fastest growing version of Islam in the world.
As a remedy against all ills - poverty, sickness, and melancholy - only one thing is absolutely necessary: a liking for work
When you awaken to what I call the Authentic Self, which is the spiritual or evolutionary impulse, what begins to emerge is the dawning recognition of the fact that each one of us, at our highest level, is that Authentic Self, which is actually the same energy and intelligence that originally inspired the entire creative process. You begin to intuit and feel directly connected to the very impulse that initiated the whole event fourteen billion years ago and is driving it right now.
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