Writer Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.

— Joyce Carol Oates

I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.

— Joyce Carol Oates

The greatest works of literature seem to embody both "art" and "morality".

— Joyce Carol Oates

I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I've written.

— Joyce Carol Oates

I am more or less reading all the time.

— Joyce Carol Oates

I am always reading or thinking about reading.

— Joyce Carol Oates

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

— Joyce Carol Oates

My writing is full of lives I might have led.

— Joyce Carol Oates

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people,…

— Joyce Carol Oates

I have read on a Kindle. But the Kindle we had only worked for about eight months then it stopped working. You…

— Joyce Carol Oates

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

“You ordinary people who read and do not write, who 'like to read' and know nothing of the sufferings of writers, how…

— Joyce Carol Oates

The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the…

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

In a sense, I may not consciously know what I'm doing. I feel that I'm telling a story. I'm a kind of…

— Joyce Carol Oates

To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is…

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

Writers and artists never pay attention to advice given by their elders, quite rightly. The only worthwhile advice is the most general:…

— Joyce Carol Oates

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing…

— Joyce Carol Oates

Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose…

— Joyce Carol Oates

By the way of connecting with subject, with theme, I was able to find a kind of lifeline. Writing's like a lifeline.…

— Joyce Carol Oates

To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved.…

— Joyce Carol Oates

“I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing…

— Joyce Carol Oates

'A Fair Maiden' existed in notes and sketches for perhaps a year. When I traveled, I would take along with me my…

— Joyce Carol Oates

“There’s a sort of melancholy romance to the experience of being lonesome. I think of reading as a kind of romantic alone…

— Joyce Carol Oates

When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then…

— Joyce Carol Oates

When one crosses over from an activity, or the verb, of writing or doing, and becomes a noun, like "a writer" I…

— Joyce Carol Oates

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the…

— Joyce Carol Oates

“I tell my students to write of their true subjects. How will they know when they are writing of their true subjects?…

— Joyce Carol Oates

My theory is that literature is essential to society in the way that dreams are essential to our lives. We can't live…

— Joyce Carol Oates

One of the qualities of writing that is not much stressed is its problem-solving aspect, having to do with the presentation of…

— Joyce Carol Oates

Most people who are writers go through periods when they can't write.

— Joyce Carol Oates

A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.

— Joyce Carol Oates

“As a librarian for 18 years at the Merck branch of the Trenton Public Library, I was sorely tested by the slow-witted…

— joyce carol oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse.

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred…

— Joyce Carol Oates