Quotes from 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.

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.

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.

Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.

Art is the highest expression of the human spirit.

the art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others.

Just as our historical beginnings are utterly mysterious-why are we born? why when and as we are?-so too are the beginnings of works of art and of "artists.

Tragedy is the highest form of art.

The greatest works of literature seem to embody both "art" and "morality".

Obviously, there is pleasure in the execution of any sort of art, and using language, as Nabokov felt also, is an exquisite process.

A diverse and lively collection, the highest art of the interview.

Writing is the most solitary of arts.

Mark Twain was very unhappy with himself for various reasons. He was very unhappy with America of this time. He thought it was terrible we had no anti-lynching laws, and he was also a feminist, and he was also very concerned with anti-Semitism. He was a good man, but he was hard on himself.

A writer's life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.

I don't think that any 'ism' is higher than literature or art. So I'm a formalist. I greatly honor and respect the form of a work.

I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hardworking.

Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.

How lawyers make work for one another! You're all priests, worshipping the same god. No wonder you adore one another.

A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.

I feel a terrible loss when I (eventually must) complete a work of fiction.

I remember once asking Grandma about a book she was reading, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and how she answered me: this was the first conversation of my life that concerned a book, and 'the life of the mind' - and now, such subjects have become my life.

The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.

If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.