45 Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates about writing
- Author Joyce Carol Oates
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Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.
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- Author Joyce Carol Oates
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I’ve never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision; a complex of emotions; raw experience. The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort.
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The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.
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Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.
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- Author Joyce Carol Oates
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My writing is full of lives I might have led.
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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.
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- Author Joyce Carol Oates
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"Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.
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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.
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- Author Joyce Carol Oates
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The domestic lives we live - which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making - help to make possible our writing lives; our imaginations are freed, or stimulated, by the very prospect of companionship, quiet, a predictable and consoling routine.
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