Joyce Carol Oates Quotes & Sayings (Page 13)

“I am what would be called a 'mainstream feminist,' not a radical feminist.”

“I have so many favorite writers, it's very hard to select a few... of classic writers, I have always admired Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau.”

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

“My parents were very proud of me. After they passed, my career doesn't mean as much to me.”

“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.”

“After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.”

“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.”

“To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.”

“People have libraries at home, they have bookshelves, they have CDs. And they sort of try, people try to bring great artists into their lives, into their physical houses and sort of live with portions of them. But they're not really deeply engaging with them.”

“I don't know what marriages are like in general, but there are many things which I don't talk about with my husband. We discuss practical problems, but I wouldn't sit down with him and talk about the distant past. It's somewhat in contrast to other Americans, who feel that they have to confess things, but I'm really not like that.”