Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

After I'd produced about two dozen pen and ink drawings, one evening I decided that they needed poems to accompany them. I still have no idea where that notion came from, but it took me about two hours to produce verses for these creatures.

When I wrote my first novel - I was nineteen - I did it very quickly. If you write fast, you feel like you're entering something not yet familiar - a world rather than thoughts about the world.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

Sometimes I'm on the pulse of what's happening in Hollywood, but other times, I'm just totally absorbed by what I'm creating on the easel.

My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

The way I create music is maybe like a painting, to compose in a more visual way. Basically it's the music that I want to hear- that's my inspiration and bottom line. I just try to get ideas from books, movies, paintings.

I like that original romance of having a pen and a legal pad and going anywhere in the world and being able to write a novel with just those two things.

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.

I have admired David Bromley's work for years. He possesses such a wild and vivid imagination and really sees the beauty in everything.

I try and make little stories. Whether it's with a pencil or with bits of records, it's really the same thing.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.

What surprised me most while writing 'The Monogram Murders' was that everything I needed seemed to arrive in my head exactly when I needed it.

When I write, I get glimpses into future novels.

What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'

It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.

When I make a movie, I have both a specific and vague, amorphous dream idea of what the movie is going to be. Of course, I don't actually know what it's going to be, but I'm still striving to get to some place with it.

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

For me, Picasso was the ultimate man. He taught me that photography is all about how you approach an image: what you do and what you don't do. He inspired me to go beyond what you think is in front of you.

I just let the character speak to me and things appear.

When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.

The time of illusion, then, is the beautiful moment of passion; it represents the artistic zone in which the poet or romance writer ought to be free to do the very best that he can.