Joyce Carol Oates Quotes about Writing

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.

while there are 'women writers' there are not, and have never been, 'men writers.' This is an empty category, a class without specimens; for the noun 'writer' - the very verb 'writing' - always implies masculinity.

I don't think that writer's block exists really. I think that when you're trying to do something prematurely, it just won't come. Certain subjects just need time, as I've learned over and over again. You've got to wait before you write about them.

I write so much because my cat sits on my lap. She purrs so I don't want to get up. She's so much more calming than my husband.

My writing is full of lives I might have led.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.

On the elusive gift of blending austerity of craft with elasticity of allure.

For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.

Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.

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.

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.

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