Quotes On Writing - A Collection of Famous Writers

Joyce Carol Oates

"How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look."

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"Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply."

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"The first sentence can't be written until the final sentence is written."

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"When I first began publishing, I was writing short stories and novels about subjects that only men were writing about - violence and men's lives."

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"If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space."

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"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."

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"Getting a draft done is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor."

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

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

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"Novels begin not on the page, but in meditation and daydreaming - in thinking, not writing."

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"Don't cast sidelong glances, and compare yourself to others among your peers! Writing is not a race. No one really 'wins.' The satisfaction is in the effort, and rarely in the consequent rewards, if there are any."

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"I don't change. I simply become more myself."

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

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"The most common misperception about me is that I write fast. I just write often. Every hour that I can."

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"Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel."

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"When I'm really involved or getting toward the end of a novel, I can write for up to ten hours a day. At those times, it's as though I'm writing a letter to someone I'm desperately in love with."

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"All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later."

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

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"For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power."

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"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."

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"When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotion 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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"Gothic fiction is the freedom of the imagination, the triumph of the unconscious. Its radical premise is that, out of utterly plausible and psychologically realistic situations, profound and intransigent truths will emerge. And it is entertaining; it is unashamed to be entertaining."

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"Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day."

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"Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice."

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"It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence."

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

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"My writing is often a way of 'bearing witness' for others who lack the education and the opportunity to tell their own stories, so I hope that my writing won't be affected too much by my personal life."

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"I've always been interested in writing about people, including young children who are not able to speak for themselves. As in my novel 'Black Water,' I provide a voice for someone who has died and can't speak for herself."

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"The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence."

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"Beginning writers may become overly discouraged by the difficulties that more experienced writers expect."

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"I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency."

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"It's impossible to read a stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to write, however entirely different one's writing will be."

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"We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it."

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"When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life."

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"Self-criticism is an art not many are qualified to practice."

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

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