A Quote by Joyce Carol Oates
Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.
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Don’t go searching for a subject, let your subject find you. You can’t rush inspiration. … Once your subject finds you, it’s like falling in love. It will be your constant companion. Shadowing you, peeping in your windows, calling you at all hours to leave messages like, Only you understand me.
You must forget all your theories, all your ideas before the subject. What part of these is really your own will be expressed in your expression of the emotion awakened in you by the subject.
In your power, all the same. Subject to your will and your demands. No longer free! No! That's a thought I'll never endure! Never.
If your subject is crime, then you know at least that you're going to have a real story. If your subject is the maturing of a college boy, you may never stumble across a story while you're telling that. But if your story is a college boy dead in his dorm room, you know there's a story in there, someplace.
But a writing project begins not just in doubt but also in faith-that if your passion is genuine, if you have mastered the elements of your craft, in the act of writing you will learn the rest of what you need to know in order to do justice to your subject.
When you're trying to make a film, you're trying to find a way to love your subject, and you want your audience to love your subject.
Scan your subject for things that are clearly impossible. After all, paint isn't magic! If you see that certain elements in the subject are beyond the limits of your pigments, try to form an idea beforehand of how you are going to handle those areas when you get to them.
Write on a subject you love. Your profit center should also be your passion center.
In a sense, every work you do is a self-portrait because your paintings always reveal more about you than about your subject. Your experience of something, not the something itself, is the true underlying subject of every work you do.
That is the thing about being a writer; your subject matter may not stay your subject matter if you break their trust by revealing personal and editorialized information about them.
What you need, above all else, is a love for your subject, whatever it is. You've got to be so deeply in love with your subject that when curve balls are thrown, when hurdles are put in place, you've got the energy to overcome them.
On one hand you want to see your subject well. On the other hand, you want to be caught off guard to retain the spontaneity. If you know your subject too well you stop seeing it.
Your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.
Never be ashamed of your love," he said gently. "The only thing to be ashamed of is denying your love. That is what makes the shadow grow within your heart; that is the darkening of the Light. And we all have many loves.
I try to ?nd clues in the documented record - from the subject's own testimony, from the testimony of other people. When you're writing a biography, you're trying to understand your subject in the same way that you try to understand one of your friends, and that effort at understanding is always very imperfect.
What you think upon grows. Whatever you allow to occupy your mind you magnify in your life. Whether the subject of your thought be good or bad, the law works and the condition grows. Any subject that you keep out of your mind tends to diminish in your life, because what you do not use atrophies. The more you think of grievances, the more such trials you will continue to receive; the more you think of the good fortune you have had, the more good fortune will come to you.
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