Joyce Carol Oates: Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines...

We come away from the tragedies of [William] Shakespeare with a profound sense of having encountered reality in its most pristine form - yet the art-work is elaborately artificial, the very genre of tragedy in poetry an anti-naturalist perspective.

Joyce Carol Oates

profound reality art

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

Joyce Carol Oates

morality literature art

It would be difficult for a writer of realism to avoid suggesting a political/moral perspective in his or her fiction. "Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

Joyce Carol Oates

perspective political writing

I am more or less reading all the time.

Joyce Carol Oates

reading

That is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand this?

Joyce Carol Oates

inspired yield reading

There is nothing "ordinary" about reality.

Joyce Carol Oates

ordinary reality

Writing allows for fictitious voices - the voices of persons unlike myself - that might otherwise be muted.

Joyce Carol Oates

voice writing might

These novels [Zombie, My Sister, My Love] are so special to me. [I don't expect that they will have nearly the same significance to anyone else.] They represent a kind of fiction I would love to pursue more or less constantly, but dare not.

Joyce Carol Oates

zombie special fiction

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

Joyce Carol Oates

execution language art

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

Joyce Carol Oates

writing

Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.

Joyce Carol Oates

return novel stories

It's always a challenge to discover the most effective first sentence, and the most effective final sentence, in a chapter for instance, and in the book as a whole.

Joyce Carol Oates

finals challenges book

Each time I undertake to reread Virginia Woolf, I am somewhat baffled by the signature breathlessness and relentlessly "poetic" tone, the shimmering impressionism, so very different from the vivid, precise, magisterial (and often very funny) prose of her contemporary James Joyce.

Joyce Carol Oates

virginia signatures different

I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs; otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in terms of the characters whom the voices express.

Joyce Carol Oates

writing character book

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

Joyce Carol Oates

desert light night

I did not consider that I would lead a literary life. I'd thought initially, as a young girl, that I would be a teacher, since I so admired many of my teachers. And though I loved writing, I did not ever think of myself as a writer.

Joyce Carol Oates

girl writing teacher

Much in our lives is chance.

Joyce Carol Oates

our-lives chance life-is

I don't believe in predestination - except for genetic predilections.

Joyce Carol Oates

predestination dont-believe believe

It is important for me to discover the ideal title, for without this title the story or novel isn't quite in focus.

Joyce Carol Oates

titles focus important

For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.

Joyce Carol Oates

revenge ordinary world

Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.