Joyce Carol Oates Quotes - Page 7

When a marriage ends, who is left to understand it?

None of the rest of my life figures here.

Any writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject you will write.

My nature is orderly and observant and scrupulous and deeply introverted.

I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.

Whoever was stupid was beneath worry or thought; you did not have to figure them out. This eliminated hundreds of people. In this life you had time only for a certain amount of thinking, and there was no need to waste any of it on people who were not threatening.

One of life's minor satisfactions is forgetting.

Nothing comes of so many things, if you have patience.

As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my 'farm chores' - but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.

The mysteries of the female sex! We men can never hope to fathom your depths, but only try not to drown in them.

When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly–why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing.

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

I have so many favorite writers, it's very hard to select a few... of classic writers, I have always admired Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau.

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.

For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.

Not to be alone. To be spared the possibility of knowing oneself, in aloneness.

You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.

People have libraries at home, they have bookshelves, they have CDs. And they sort of try, people try to bring great artists into their lives, into their physical houses and sort of live with portions of them. But they're not really deeply engaging with them.

You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.

When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.

My writing is often a way of 'bearing witness' for others who lack the education and the opportunity to tell their own stories, so I hope that my writing won't be affected too much by my personal life.

Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?

I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.

Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.