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
Much in our lives is chance.
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.
Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.
I don't believe in predestination - except for genetic predilections.
Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.
Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.
And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.
The greatest works of literature seem to embody both "art" and "morality".
See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be
The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.
Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.
To choose the ideal voice for a character is to give a character an ardent and vivid life, to allow him or her to speak, rather than speaking for them, in an older style of omniscient narration.
The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.