Joyce Carol Oates Quotes - Page 3

There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You're dead, yet alive. There's no sensation so exquisite.

Perhaps the inevitable tragedy of our complex civilization is that we must be specialists in our fields - and our fields have become increasingly difficult, so that communication is nearly impossible.

Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.

It feels good, honey, but it isn't love.

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

It must happen to everyone. The last time you make love, you can't know it will be the last.

The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct

Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.

The mere passage of time makes us all exiles.

Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.

I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.

Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.

Near the point of impact, time acelerates to the speed of light.

Art is about freedom of expression, and should not be molded to fit any propaganda or lofty ideal.

When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.

Evil isn't a cosmological riddle, only just selfish human behavior.

Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.

Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense.

It's always a challenge to discover the most effective first sentence, and the most effective final sentence, in a chapter for instance, and in the book as a whole.

There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.

Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.

I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.

A daydreamer is prepared for most things.