Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

I think some people think that writers read and read and read, get the information, and then write. That's not how it works. Often, you write yourself into a dark place where you don't know what you need to know, so you go get the information.

I hated writing 'Love Warrior.' It's the hardest thing I've every written. I cried.

Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book. Some, I have to do quite a lot of research, which I like. Others are much closer to me.

I had no idea how complicated and solitary it could be to write a simple book.

I think what happens to young writers is that they use up every life experience that they have had up to that point for their first novel. Then you have to come up with something for the second novel, but you really don't have anything to say.

In every novel, I write about something - a place, an experience, an emotion - with which I'm intimately familiar, but it's also crucial to me that I take on challenges. If write only inside my comfort zone, I'll suffocate.

Anybody who likes writing a book is an idiot. Because it's impossible; it's like having a homework assignment every stinking day until it's done. And by the time you get it in, it's done and you're sitting there reading it, and you realize the 12,000 things you didn't do. I mean, writing isn't fun. It's never been fun.

I love stories. I just enjoy telling stories and watching what these characters do - although writing continues to be just as hard as it always was.

I don't think screenwriting is therapeutic. It's actually really, really hard for me. It's not an enjoyable process.

I find coming up with a title the hardest part of writing a novel.

I think if I've worked anything through with screenwriting it's that I'm not going to be able to work anything through.

In my brief writing life, it means I am still lucky that I have at least one more novel to complete. I do not expect that a story will arrive just because it is time to write another novel. It doesn't happen that way.

The problem with books, now that I've written one, is that the idea of adaptation is so much easier than sitting down to write something new.

'Baker Towers' is the book I've always known I would write, but it wasn't an easy book to do.

Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.

Sometimes in writing you have difficult periods and then other times it just flows.

My entry into screenwriting was not smooth.

Writing a book is an emotional odyssey, sometimes exhilarating, other times deflating.

I've been writing for years, you know, and when I get to a particular place, city, or different locale, I find myself first of all being challenged by those that love me to write more.

'The Rose Society' was definitely the hardest book I've ever written, because it's so difficult to stay in that dark space.

The process of writing a book has given me a whole new reverence for writers. Mechanically, it is a brutal process; emotionally, it's incredibly healing.

Fluency can be a sign that nothing is happening; fluency can actually be my signal to stop, while being in the dark from sentence to sentence is what convinces me to go on.

I think each time you start a story or novel or whatever, you are absolutely at the bottom of the ladder all over again. It doesn't matter what you've done before.

If you try to write a novel in L.A., you're a chump; everyone is speeding by, and you're driving a rickshaw.

I said to Ruth Rendell, 'When you've written as many books as you have, it's easier.' She said, 'No dear, it gets harder'.