Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

No one is a plain white room. I hate going into a home that is done to the nines but has nothing do with the homeowner - no knickknacks, no art that has anything to say about the person who lives there.

Art is all a matter of personality.

A voice is such a deep, personal reflection of character.

People are funny in the way that they choose to express themselves.

Self-expression is the dominant necessity of human nature.

Everyone is normal until you get to know them.

Like the rest of us, Tom Paulin is a bundle of contradictions. At its finest, his work is brave, adventurous, original and wonderfully idiosyncratic.

You can't acquire a voice. Either you have it, or you don't.

Personality is to a man what perfume is to a flower.

Style is the hallmark of a temperament stamped upon the material at hand.

The best subjects are always people, who never fail to amaze me by their unpredictability.

People are incorrigibly themselves.

Things aren't interesting if you level them. It's the voice that's interesting.

The fact is that all of us have only one personality, and we wring it out like a dishtowel. You are what you are.

Assuming roles is something that simply won't work for me, since I don't have a style. None at all.

No two dramatists think or write alike. Ten thousand playwrights can take the same premise, as they have done since Shakespeare, and not one play will resemble the other except in the premise. Your knowledge, your understanding of human nature, and your imagination will take care of that.

I think people like it when you have a bit of personality.

The voice is a second face.

All greatness of character is dependent on individuality.

If you book the same models that look and act the same in every show - I get the continuity, and it is beautiful to see, but there's also no life to it. I'm personally not a fan of that.

Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.

There's such a thing as being a little too perfect - a little too shiny. I know I prefer things that have room to breathe and give you a story, a world, in which you have the room to move around.

I just feel like people are who they are.

I think it's okay to have fun and show some character and some personality.

Macro humor is just a person being themselves in a situation, saying whatever they're going to say, and it's funny because of the situation and who they are, or they say something, and it's just so them.