Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oatesis an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over 40 novels, as well as a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them, two O. Henry Awards, and the National Humanities Medal. Her novels Black Water, What I Lived For, Blonde, and short story collections The Wheel of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth16 June 1938
CityLockport, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Joyce Carol Oates quotes about
Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.
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.
It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else's private world with our own.
Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!
Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.
Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.
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.
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.
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.
Any kind of creative activity is likely to be stressful. The more anxiety, the more you feel that you are headed in the right direction. Easiness, relaxation, comfort - these are not conditions that usually accompany serious work.
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.
Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
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.