Joyce Carol Oates Quotes - Page 4

The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.

The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it won't last; nothing can guarantee it.

The cleaning is something I use as a reward if I get some work done. I go into a very happy state of mind when I'm vacuuming.

Look at the world and see what's there. It's very beautiful. It's a very exciting but in some ways treacherous world, and all this goes into the writing.

The only people who claim that money is not important are people who have enough money so that they are relieved of the ugly burden of thinking about it.

All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later.

"Because there has been no one to stop me" has been one of the principles of my life.

Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.

Maybe, love is always forgiveness, to a degree.

Writers and artists never pay attention to advice given by their elders, quite rightly. The only worthwhile advice is the most general: Keep trying, don't give up, don't be discouraged, don't pay attention to detractors. Everyone knows this.

An actress wants to be seen. An actress wants to be loved. By multitudes of people, not just one lone man.

It's a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living--we who have survived--understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead. At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices, You will not forget me -- will you? How can you forget me? I have no one but you.

Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.

Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.

I'm very American in the sense of being an explorer. America is filled with people who are interested in exploring landscapes, either external or internal. A westward nation of explorers.

I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.

Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.

Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.

the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.

All actors are whores. They want only one thing: to seduce you.

Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.

He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.

The regional voice is the universal voice.

Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.