Joyce Carol Oates Quotes about Writing - Page 2

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

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.

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.

It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.

I haven't any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that I don't take a break for many hours - and consequently have breakfast at two or three in the afternoon on good days.

After my husband died, I could not write much - I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time even to contemplate writing. But I did take notes - not for fiction, but for a journal, or diary, of this terrible time. I did not think that I would ever survive this interlude.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

The appeal of writing is primarily the investigation of mystery.

The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.

Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.

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.

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

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 did not consider that I would lead a literary life. I'd thought initially, as a young girl, that I would be a teacher, since I so admired many of my teachers. And though I loved writing, I did not ever think of myself as a writer.

Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.

I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.

I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs; otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in terms of the characters whom the voices express.

Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.

Writing is the most solitary of arts.

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. That's a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munch's strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like 'The Scream.' Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.

When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way.