Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

The trouble with you and me, is that we don't live in the real world. We dream of fantastic things that may never happen.

Historians have to deal with facts and they are committed to the facts. The trouble is that facts are imperfect. The novelist comes up with an imaginary structure. This is not what happened. It is what could have happened. And sometimes this brings more understanding …

The real world is much smaller than the imaginary

It seldom seems to strike the ultra-Darwinists that theology might have its own richness and subtleties, and might strange thought actually tell us things about the world that are not only to our real advantage, but will never be revealed by science.

It should surprise no one that the life of the writer - such as it is - is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation. Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.

In the world of the imagination, anything goes that's imaginatively possible, but nothing really happens.

It makes sense to work towards a better world, but it doesn't make any sense to have illusions about what the real world is.

A world is to be fought for, sung, and built: Love must imagine the world.

One of the beauties of being an artist is that you can create a whole new world, with circumstances that are better in your invented world than they are in the real world.

What for me is bliss and life and ecstasy and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most in imagination; in life it finds it absurd.

And the more she could imagine this island, the less she liked the real world. The more she could imagine the people, the less she liked any real people.

He knew what he knew: that the real world was full of magic, so magical worlds could easily be real.

The superiority of the dreamer is that dreaming is much more practical than living, and that the dreamer extracts from life a much vaster and varied pleasure than the action man. In better and more direct words, the dreamer is the real action man.

Creativity is not enough... the skill of the true artist is to show the real in the light of the ideal and so transfigure it.

Boundary lines, of any type, are never found in the real world itself, but only in the imagination of the mapmakers.

To present a whole world that doesn’t exist and make it seem real, we have to more or less pretend we’re polymaths. That’s just the act of all good writing.

I like the immaterial world. I like to live among thoughts and images of the past and the possible, and even of the impossible, now and then.

There are two kinds of world: the one we dream about and the real one.

I kind of like the idea of taking a concept and going all the way with it, even if it's not completely plausible. It's something that I like about making movies. You have a concept that maybe would not work in real life, but you can make it work in the world you're creating.

The world is about the way in which our dreams intersect with our real life. Endlessly, the world of the imagination changes the world.

If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane.

If I ruled the world Imagine that...

Exquisite nature, daydreams, and music say one thing, real life another.

We can redream this world and make the dream come real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves.

Man's own youth is the world's youth; at least he feels as if it were, and imagines that the earth's granite substance is something not yet hardened, and which he can mould into whatever shape he likes.