A Quote by Joyce Carol Oates
Honorary degrees and lifetime achievement awards are very encouraging. I know that it might sound strange that a writer who has published many books still needs encouragement, but this is true.
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To date, [Wynton] Marsalis has received a total of nine Grammy Awards; a Pulitzer Prize (the first ever awarded to a jazz musician)... and twenty-nine honorary degrees, including Columbia, Brown, Princeton and Yale; the National Medal of Arts; and numerous awards from other countries.
I sometimes wonder how many of these lifetime achievement awards you can accept before you have to do the decent thing and die.
I have published so many books in so many years. I can't complain about any lack of attention. But I've never been placed as a Southern writer, which I really am. So I was happy finally to be published by someone in the South.
Very wonderful books might be published, and very terrible books might be published.
I was writing at a really young age, but it took me a long time to be brave enough to become a published writer, or to try to become a published writer. It's a very public way to fail. And I was kind of scared, so I started out as a ghost writer, and I wrote for other series, like Disney 'Aladdin' and 'Sweet Valley' and books like that.
People with honorary awards are looked upon with disfavor. Would you let an honorary mechanic fix your brand-new Mercedes?
I think the best part of being Catholic, strange as it might sound, is that I know it's right. It's true.
I have two college degrees, four honorary doctorate degrees, and am in three Halls of fame, and the only thing I know how to do is teach tall people how to put a ball in the hole.
Despite everything I've achieved in my life, the culinary awards, the military commendations, the honorary degrees, I have never, ever lost sight of what's truly important. The thing that gives meaning to these triumphs. Someone to share them with. A companion. A help mate. A wife.
The nightmare of censorship has always cast a shadow over my thoughts. Both under the previous state and under the Islamic state, I have said again and again that, when there is an apparatus for censorship that filters all writing, an apparatus comes into being in every writer's mind that says: "Don't write this, they won't allow it to be published." But the true writer must ignore these murmurings. The true writer must write. In the end, it will be published one day, on the condition that the writer writes the truth and does not dissemble.
The librarian of today, and it will be true still more of the librarians of tomorrow, are not fiery dragons interposed between the people and the books. They are useful public servants, who manage libraries in the interest of the public . . . Many still think that a great reader, or a writer of books, will make an excellent librarian. This is pure fallacy.
I didn't think [Ella Enchanted] would get published. Everything I'd written till then had been rejected. If it was published, I thought it might sell a few thousand copies and go out of print. I thought if I was lucky I could write more books and get them published, too. I still pinch myself over the way things have worked out.
It's crucial that I kind of keep up, without drifting into the backslapping land of cliche and lifetime achievement awards.
Who I am, what I am, is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, a lifetime of stories. And there are still so many more books to read. I'm a work in progress.
It may sound strange to say it of someone so famous, but I think Leonardo DiCaprio is underrated, particularly from an awards perspective. He is a very versatile actor. He started very young, and 'What's Eating Gilbert Grape?' is one of my favourite films.
You would have to be very optimistic to think that any of your books will be among the books that survive in the very long run. I think if a writer is lucky enough to still have a few books around after he's gone, a few that are still being read, then he's accomplished quite a lot.
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