Joyce Carol Oates Quotes
-
You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.
→ -
Among many of my friends and acquaintances, I seem to be one of the very few individuals who felt or feels no ambivalence about my mother. All my feelings for my mother were positive, very strong and abiding.
→ -
A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?
→ -
There is nothing "ordinary" about reality.
→ -
I am more or less reading all the time.
→ -
And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs.
→ -
[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.
→ -
My writing is full of lives I might have led.
→ -
Before I undertake a lengthy project, I have usually given much thought to it over a period of years. My files are filled with likely subjects - which perhaps, one day, I will develop.
→ -
the art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others.
→ -
We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.
→ -
I don't think that any 'ism' is higher than literature or art. So I'm a formalist. I greatly honor and respect the form of a work.
→ -
A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.
→ -
celebrate while you can
→ -
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.
→ -
Henry David Thoreau is very independent-minded, very iconoclastic, and had quite a corrosive sense of humor. I think that I probably have grown up to have a Thoreauvian perspective on many things. Though in other ways I live a life he would not have approved of. He believed to simplify, simplify, simplify. Make your life very clear and plain and meditative and not confused. Sometimes my life, in fact, is confused.
→ -
These are the moments for which we live.
→ -
Only when men are connected to large, universal goals are they really happy-and one result of their happiness is a rush of creative activity.
→ -
Art is the highest expression of the human spirit.
→ -
An actress wants to be seen. An actress wants to be loved. By multitudes of people, not just one lone man.
→ -
A writer who has published as many books as I have has developed, of necessity, a hide like a rhino's, while inside there dwells a frail, hopeful butterfly of a spirit.
→ -
Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.
→ -
Better to be despised, then, than to be ignored; or damned with condescending praise.
→ -
God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.
→ -
Only in love is there trust - even the possibility of trust.
→ -
Each genre exerts a considerable spell, as a kind of "form" to be filled, as a Shakespearean sonnet is filled.
→ -
After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.
→ -
Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.
→ -
Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsessions, to resist what is, to defy one's elders, even to the point of ostracism; to define oneself, and by extension one's generation, as new, novel, ungovernable.
→ -
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.
→
Related Authors
-
Alexandra Wentworth Actress -
Otto Penzler Editor -
Philip Roth Novelist -
Don DeLillo Writer -
James Joyce Novelist -
William Faulkner Writer -
Siri Hustvedt Novelist -
Edgar Allan Poe Author -
Toni Morrison Novelist -
John Updike Novelist -
Jonathan Safran Foer Writer -
Ernest Hemingway Author -
Paul Auster Author -
Flannery O'Connor Writer -
Cormac McCarthy Novelist -
Cynthia Ozick Writer -
Bryce Dallas Howard Film actress -
Norman Mailer Novelist -
Shirley Jackson Author -
Alice Munro Author