Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

It's amazing what you can do without in terms of filmmaking when a story is really important.

People have asked me a lot, 'What comes first? The pictures or the story? The story or the picture?' It's hard to describe because often they seem to come at the same time. I'm seeing images while I'm thinking of the story.

'Cry Baby' is like this fairytale version of me. A lot of it is based on real events, and some of it is made up to make it more whimsical.

Great theater continues to bind us, one to the other, and most of us will travel far and wide to see a good story told well.

As artists, our job is to communicate thoughts and tell stories.

I'm an artist - I'm an actor - so when I'm looking for something, I'm looking for stories.

We're moved by emotions and characters and stories. We love that.

I think whatever is going on with my brain, I'm very, very - and I'm not saying this as a positive thing, it's just a fact - I'm very creative. I have a very strong imagination, and have since I was a little kid. That is where a lot of my world comes from. It's like I'm off somewhere else. And I can have a problem in life because of that, because I'm always off in some other world thinking about something else. It's constant.

I think both you and I, we live in a world of fiction and stories.

I'm a slave to my imagination in terms of making narrative films.

Sometimes journalists ask me, "What's the message?" There is no message. I think that fiction should not be trying to give messages. Just tell a story.

I love to act, I've always wanted to be an actor. I think that acting and fiction go nicely together - being able to visualize language as something you perform, not just something that's there on the page.

I think telling stories is like pushing something. Pushing against uncreation itself, maybe.

The imagination demands that life be told slant because of its need of distance.

Fiction is of the essence of poetry as well as of painting; there is a resemblance in one of human bodies, things, and actions which are not real, and in the other of a true story by fiction.

I think of myself as a songwriter, a weaver of story and imagination in a way that a novelist might write a book.

I just think, as a species, what we [people] enjoy most is creation and creativity, and telling stories is an extension of expressing all the thoughts and ideas that we have inside of ourselves.

I keep on having ideas and developments. Some happen and some don't, but I still always have a way of telling a story.

I write fiction, there's no guarantee that what I say is truthful.

I start by mulling a question and before I know it, a whole drama is unfolding in my head. Often, an idea sticks before I know what I'm going to do with it.

Everything in the world was about creativity: belief and creation. Storytelling was the essence of both.

Fantasy is a product of thought, Imagination of sensibility. If the thinking, discursive mind turns to speculation, the result isFantasy; if, however, the sensitive, intuitive mind turns to speculation, the result is Imagination. Fantasy may be visionary, but it is cold and logical. Imagination is sensuous and instinctive. Both have form, but the form of Fantasy is analogous to Exposition, that of Imagination to Narrative.

I think you can teach people a technique - you can teach them how to use their voices, how to breathe properly, how to move their limbs a certain way. But to actually explain how one performs comedy or drama or tragedy isn't the same as the movements one makes.

My husband says I have too much imagination, but I don't think a writer can have too much imagination!

A lofty mind always thinks nobly, it easily creates vivid, agreeable, and natural fancies, places them in their best light, clothes them with all appropriate adornments, studies others' tastes, and clears away from its own thoughts all that is useless and disagreeable.