Joyce Carol Oates Zitate auf Englisch

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For some reason, voters can be brainwashed, and they vote sometimes against their own best interests, let alone voting against the interests of people who need them, like people who are disenfranchised and people who are poor and so forth.

Joyce Carol Oates

The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.

Joyce Carol Oates

My own way of writing is very meditated and, despite my reputation, rather slow-moving. So I do spend a good deal of time contemplating endings. The final ending is usually arrived at simply by intuition.

Joyce Carol Oates

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.

Joyce Carol Oates

You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.

Joyce Carol Oates

The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.

Joyce Carol Oates

I haven't any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that I don't take a break for many hours - and consequently have breakfast at two or three in the afternoon on good days.

Joyce Carol Oates

Primarily, 'Black Girl/White Girl' is the story of two very different, yet somehow 'fated' girls; for Genna, her 'friendship' with Minette is the most haunting of her life, though it is one-sided and ends in tragedy.

Joyce Carol Oates

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.

Joyce Carol Oates

My reputation for writing quickly and effortlessly notwithstanding, I am strongly in favor of intelligent, even fastidious revision, which is, or certainly should be, an art in itself.

Joyce Carol Oates

I consider tragedy the highest form of art.

Joyce Carol Oates

When I wrote 'We Were The Mulvaneys,' I was just old enough to look back upon my own family life and the lies of certain individuals close to me, with the detachment of time. I wanted to tell the truth about secrets: How much pain they give, yet how much relief, even happiness we may feel when at last the motive for secrecy has passed.

Joyce Carol Oates

Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.

Joyce Carol Oates

I don't think I'm morbid by nature. Serious writers have always written about serious subjects. Lighthearted material doesn't appeal to me, and I don't read it. I think I'm a realist, with a realistic sensibility of history and the tragedy of history.

Joyce Carol Oates

I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.

Joyce Carol Oates

The historical Woodrow Wilson suffered from numerous complaints which we might today label as psychosomatic. Yet, Wilson did have a stroke as a relatively young man of 39 and seemed always to be ill. He was 'high-strung' - intensely neurotic - yet a charismatic personality nonetheless.

Joyce Carol Oates

I really love to set things in places that are real to me.

Joyce Carol Oates

I haven't the faintest idea what my royalties are. I haven't the faintest idea how many copies of books sold, or how many books that I've written. I could look these things up; I have no interest in them. I don't know how much money I have. There are a lot of things I just don't care about.

Joyce Carol Oates

As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my 'farm chores' - but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.

Joyce Carol Oates

I don't read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I'm also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.

Joyce Carol Oates

If my favorite, most comfortable place is by our fireplace in cold weather, expedient places are on an airplane, in a waiting room or even waiting in line; frequently these days, while on the phone having been 'put on hold.'

Joyce Carol Oates

I wrote a novel called 'Blonde,' which is about Norma Jean Baker, who becomes Marilyn Monroe, which I called a fictitious biography. That uses the material as if it were myth - that Marilyn Monroe is like this mythical figure in our culture.

Joyce Carol Oates

I can't say I was a very successful sorority girl.

Joyce Carol Oates

Love is an indescribable sensation - perhaps a conviction, a sense of certitude.

Joyce Carol Oates

People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.

Joyce Carol Oates

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

Joyce Carol Oates

I am concerned with only one thing, the moral and social conditions of my generation.

Joyce Carol Oates

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

Joyce Carol Oates

'The Accursed' is very much a novel about social injustice as the consequence of the terrible, tragic division of classes - the exploitation not only of poor and immigrant workers but of their young children in factories and mills - and as the consequence of race hatred in the aftermath of the Civil War and the freeing of the slaves.

Joyce Carol Oates

Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.

Joyce Carol Oates

Often in gothic novels there's a large house, an estate, and it's symbolic of that culture. Usually it's sort of moldering or rotted or something, and sometimes it's a whole community.

Joyce Carol Oates

I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.

Joyce Carol Oates

I compose most of my tweets with care, as if they were aphorisms - they are not usually dashed-off. Sometimes I'm surprised by the high, poetic quality of Twitter - it lends itself to a surreal sort of self-expression.

Joyce Carol Oates

The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.

Joyce Carol Oates

Most people think that a widow is inhabiting some elegiac world of - it's like Mozart's 'Requiem Mass.' You know, it's very beautiful and elevated thoughts and some measure of dignity. I didn't have that experience at all. I had one pratfall after another.

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 temple, books might safely reside.

Joyce Carol Oates