Joyce Carol Oates - Writing Quotes

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

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
When I'm really involved or getting towards 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.

Joyce Carol Oates
While there are 'women writers' there are not, and have never been, 'men writers.' This is an empty category, a class without specimens; for the noun 'writer' — the very verb 'writing' — always implies masculinity.

Joyce Carol Oates
Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

Joyce Carol Oates
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.

Joyce Carol Oates
One must be pitiless about this matter of 'mood.' In a sense the writing will create the mood.... I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing-card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes... and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. Or appears to do so.

Joyce Carol Oates
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.

Joyce Carol Oates