Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

My sophomore English teacher encouraged me to write for the school paper, and that's what got me started. Suddenly it struck me that being a writer could be a romantic and adventurous position. Previously, I had thought I would be a tennis pro, giving lessons at a local club. I thought that would be a good life, and it might have been.

Growing up in Rhode Island, I dreamed of a career in law enforcement. That hasn't worked out exactly as I had planned, but life seldom does.

I didn't intend to be an actress. It was one of many things I was interested in, and it just took off. I was an actress between the ages of 18 and 22, and it was a wonderful, fun thing to do, but it wasn't what I intended long term. I parked acting a long time ago.

I certainly never expected to be a professional actor. I never expected to be in movies. I thought I would probably become a teacher.

I never dreamed I would want to be or become a financial advisor.

When I was 14, I told my mother I intended to be in the House of Commons in the morning, in court in the afternoon and on stage in the evening. She realised then a fantasist had been born.

I never thought I would just be doing Arkady books.

When I was 20 years old, I had no plans to ever be a filmmaker.

My future plans are hazy, and I've yet to experience how much cartooning is in my blood and therefore how much I'll miss it. But I have some other interests, especially in music, and I will probably take the opportunity to delve into those things more deeply.

I don't want to just be fully rapping my whole life.

I just don't want to be rapping forever. I love it, but sometimes you got goals for yourself.

If you told me when I was a teen that I would end up being a teacher, I would have said you're out of your mind, because quite frankly I hated school.

Like most people, I was not able to start selling my stories right away. So I had many other jobs along the way to becoming a writer, including toy maker, gravedigger, cookware salesman, and assembly line worker. Eventually, I became an elementary teacher and worked with second and fourth graders.

I have to warn you, I'm not just some sitcom guy. I'm now an author.

I want to be a lawyer, a dancer, an actress, a mother, a wife, a children's author, a distance runner, a poet, a pianist, a pet store owner, an astronaut, an environmental and humanitarian activist, a psychiatrist, a ballet teacher, and the first woman president.

I never thought I would become amazing. I never thought I would be as great as my father. I would like to continue writing novels, and hopefully, at some point, I would like to make the switch from being 'Stephen Hawking's daughter' to 'novelist Lucy Hawking,' and that will be a fabulous day.

Once I accomplish one thing and I'm satisfied, I try something else. I may be 50 and doing something totally outside of music and acting. Maybe I'll become a kindergarten teacher.

If you ask a ten-year-old girl what she wants to do when she grows up and a fourteen-year-old girl what she wants to be when she grows up, in many cases, the older child will have a much less free sense of what's possible.

If you knew me before Myspace, you'd probably thought I'd have been a scholar teaching philosophy in a university my whole life. If you met me before college, you'd probably have thought I'd be a musician for my entire life.

I never wanted to be an actress. Acting wasn't in my mind. It wasn't in my calculations.

My manager always brings up this fact that when I was 10 and first met her I said I never want to do movies and TV.

I didn't want to be the 40-year-old still on MTV doing 'Real World.' I loved the show. I loved the people on it, but I had a different set of goals.

Since I was a young girl, I always wanted to pursue law studies. I would have never imagined that my career would have taken a complete different route.

At one point, I just decided that it might be more creatively rewarding to put my time into writing on stuff that I could really be proud of rather than trying to get a one-episode part on 'Modern Family' or something.

I wanted to be a teacher because that is all I knew. It was a great course on primary school education, in which I could specialise in music, but I ended up dropping out after I was honest with myself about what I really wanted to do with my life.