Joyce Carol Oates Quotes - Page 10

How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?

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.

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.

Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments; it stirs our capacity for dreaming.

Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.

There is a terrible weight in all kinds of beauty

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.

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books.

When I'm really involved or getting towards the end of a novel, I can write for up to ten hours a day. At those times, it's as though I'm writing a letter to someone I'm desperately in love with.

Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.

Better to be despised, then, than to be ignored; or damned with condescending praise.

To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box.

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

To claim - to claim repeatedly - that you are innocent of what it is claimed by others that you have done, or might have done, or are in some quarters strongly suspected of having done, is never enough unless others, numerous others, will say it for you.

My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.

It's one of those secrets that's embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students.

It is important for me to discover the ideal title, for without this title the story or novel isn't quite in focus.

The greatest works of literature seem to embody both "art" and "morality".

I feel akin to [William] Shakespeare in the sense that, as I see it, he lived to dramatize the unfailingly exciting, unfathomably strange interplay among human beings that constitutes "scenes" in his plays, and constitutes "story" in prose fiction.

We come away from the tragedies of [William] Shakespeare with a profound sense of having encountered reality in its most pristine form - yet the art-work is elaborately artificial, the very genre of tragedy in poetry an anti-naturalist perspective.

Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process.

It would be difficult for a writer of realism to avoid suggesting a political/moral perspective in his or her fiction. "Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.

Writing allows for fictitious voices - the voices of persons unlike myself - that might otherwise be muted.

I don't believe in predestination - except for genetic predilections.