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 More Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates More Quotes From Joyce Carol Oates The cleaning is something I use as a reward if I get some work done. I go into a very happy state of mind when I'm vacuuming. Joyce Carol Oates doneusemind Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat. Joyce Carol Oates hungryrealizingloneliness Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive. Joyce Carol Oates monumentsurvivalhurt 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 writingartthinking The suicide does not play the game, does not observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and leaves the other guests painfully uncomfortable. Joyce Carol Oates partysuicidegrieving Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed. Joyce Carol Oates creativityinspiringmean When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly–why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing. Joyce Carol Oates realstupidsilly Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion. Joyce Carol Oates opticsillusionsight I believe that any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression. ... Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it. The more original and unsettling their art, the more devastating the punishment. Joyce Carol Oates punishmentbelieveart I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them. Joyce Carol Oates always-believebeliefbelieve I don't think that writer's block exists really. I think that when you're trying to do something prematurely, it just won't come. Certain subjects just need time, as I've learned over and over again. You've got to wait before you write about them. Joyce Carol Oates blockwritingthinking Self-criticism, like self-administered brain surgery, is perhaps not a good idea. Can the 'self' see the 'self' with any objectivity? Joyce Carol Oates objectivityselfideas The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love. Joyce Carol Oates unrequited-lovememorablelife Loneliness is dangerous ... because if aloneness does not lead to God, it leads to the devil. It leads to the self. Joyce Carol Oates devillonelinessself Any writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject you will write. Joyce Carol Oates wasting-timegoalwriting The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn't there something reassuring about it! -- that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another's eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms -- nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss? Joyce Carol Oates coloreyeloss I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all. Joyce Carol Oates giving-upwritingart And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs. Joyce Carol Oates eyemotherworld "Because there has been no one to stop me" has been one of the principles of my life. Joyce Carol Oates has-beensprincipleslife I feel akin to [William] Shakespeare in the sense that, as I see it, he lived to dramatize the unfailingly exciting, unfathomably strange interplay among human beings that constitutes "scenes" in his plays, and constitutes "story" in prose fiction. Joyce Carol Oates storiesplayfiction
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