Joyce Carol Oates
Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.Collection: Reading
I don't believe in predestination - except for genetic predilections.Collection: Believe
These novels [Zombie, My Sister, My Love] are so special to me. [I don't expect that they will have nearly the same significance to anyone else.] They represent a kind of fiction I would love to pursue more or less constantly, but dare not.Collection: Zombie
That is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand this?Collection: Reading
My life is a very interior and solitary life. I tend not to care that much about external things.Collection: Solitary Life
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.Collection: Inspirational
A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?Collection: Hurt
Each genre exerts a considerable spell, as a kind of "form" to be filled, as a Shakespearean sonnet is filled.Collection: Kind
My parents inspired me by their example. They both grew up in the Depression, and both of them had to quit school when they were quite young to work, because there actually was no choice. So they've always impressed me with their resilience, their good spirits, their courage. I just remember them carrying on and just doing their lives. They really made a strong impression on me.Collection: Strong
Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.Collection: Suicide
you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.Collection: Dark
The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me.Collection: Spiritual
Every scar in my face is worth it.Collection: Faces
Vividly imagined, beautifully written, at times almost unbearably suspenseful-the stories in Kristiana Kahakauwila's debut collection, This Is Paradise, are boldly inventive in their exploration of the tenuous nature of human relations. These are poignant stories of 'paradise'-Hawai'i-with all that 'paradise' entails of the transience of sensuous beauty.Collection: Stories
I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories, choosing an appropriate language with which to tell the story: This seems to me quintessentially human, one of the great adventures of our species.Collection: Spiritual
Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art.Collection: Art
There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You're dead, yet alive. There's no sensation so exquisite.Collection: Believe
I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.Collection: Believe
Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.Collection: Loneliness
Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.Collection: Stories
The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinctCollection: Stars
Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.Collection: Inspiring
Evil isn't a cosmological riddle, only just selfish human behavior.Collection: Selfish
Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense.Collection: Memories
The mere passage of time makes us all exiles.Collection: Philosophical
There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.Collection: Past
Art is about freedom of expression, and should not be molded to fit any propaganda or lofty ideal.Collection: Art
I believe that the creative impulse is natural in all human beings, and that it is particularly powerful in children unless it is suppressed. Consequently, one is behaving normally and instinctively and healthily when one is creating - literature, art, music, or whatever. An excellent cook is also creative! I am disturbed that a natural human inclination [creative work] should, by some Freudian turn of phrase, be considered compulsive - perhaps even pathological. To me this is a complete misreading of the human enterprise. One should also enjoy one's work, and look forward to it daily.Collection: Art
The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it won't last; nothing can guarantee it.Collection: Marriage
The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.Collection: Writing
The only people who claim that money is not important are people who have enough money so that they are relieved of the ugly burden of thinking about it.Collection: Money
An actress wants to be seen. An actress wants to be loved. By multitudes of people, not just one lone man.Collection: Men
"Because there has been no one to stop me" has been one of the principles of my life.Collection: Life
Maybe, love is always forgiveness, to a degree.Collection: Love Is
I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.Collection: Water
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.Collection: Beautiful
It must happen to everyone. The last time you make love, you can't know it will be the last.Collection: Broken Heart
It's a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living--we who have survived--understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead. At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices, You will not forget me -- will you? How can you forget me? I have no one but you.Collection: Voice
It's very hard to be an experimental woman writer. If I had been writing under a pseudonym, just initials, I might have a different reputation - but, then I couldn't be myself either.Collection: Writing
One of the large consolations for experiencing anything unpleasant is the knowledge that one can communicate it.Collection: Communication
When you give up struggle, there's a kind of love.Collection: Giving Up
What you call your personality, you know? --it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been.Collection: Flames
When poets - write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane.Collection: Writing
Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.Collection: Believe
Later, her first intense, serious love affair, yes then she'd lost something more tangible, if undefinable: her heart? her independence? her control of, definition of, self? That first true loss, the furious bafflement of it. And never again quite so assured, confident.Collection: Heart
I could EAT YOUR HEART & asshole you'd never know it.Collection: Heart
Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?If it were not for language, could we lie?Collection: Lying
Who is to blame for this most recent of sports disgraces in America? The culture that flings young athletes like Tyson up out of obscurity, makes millionaires of them and watches them self-destruct?Collection: Sports
That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.Collection: Real