American - Novelist | June 16, 1938 -
Among many of my friends and acquaintances, I seem to be one of the very few individuals who felt or feels no ambivalence about my mother. All my feelings for my mother were positive, very strong and abiding.
Joyce Carol Oates
PositiveMotherStrongFriendsSeem
Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse.
GreatI AmMeBetterPersonDetroit
My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.
RoleRole ModelsJane AustenVirginia
I am concerned with only one thing, the moral and social conditions of my generation.
I AmGenerationMoralSocialOnly
We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.
ChallengeWorldEmotionalSenseOur
I haven't the faintest idea what my royalties are. I haven't the faintest idea how many copies of books sold, or how many books that I've written. I could look these things up; I have no interest in them. I don't know how much money I have. There are a lot of things I just don't care about.
MoneyCareLookKnowUpThings
Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.
WritingAchieveImportantYoungPoet
Henry James's later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it's transcribed into written prose.
CuriousBetterSpeechRoamingBeen
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.
LoveGoodMorningBreakfastWriting
We are all regionalists in our origins, however 'universal' our themes and characters, and without our cherished hometowns and childhood landscapes to nourish us, we would be like plants set in shallow soil. Our souls must take root - almost literally.
ChildhoodPlantsSoilWithoutTake
Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.
ChildYoungTempleSacredBooks
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.
LifeMindMeBookReadingMy Life
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