Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

I wrote out little mysteries in longhand, and my mother typed them out on an old Remington.

I've been writing since I was 7, but before that, I was orally making stories.

I wrote my first book at eight, all of four pages. At 10, I did a 40-page story. At 12, I wrote two stage plays.

I didn't start writing until late high school and then I was just diddling. Mainly I loved to read and my writing was an outgrowth of that.

I started writing when I was 4.

I've been a writer since I was a kid. I've been a writer since I was, you know, dictating stories into a tape deck and trying to get my mom to type them up - when I was really, really little.

I love acting, but directing and writing have always been just as important. I started to write so many things when I was even a child. I wrote my first play when I was, like, seven years old. That was me - a writer - for years.

My friends and I started making films when I was still in kindergarten.

I started painting when I was in high school.

My mother says I was writing before I was crawling. I wrote in the dirt with a twig.

I do quite a lot of art, with a small 'a'. I guess that is how I was dredged up, with paints and crayons. Even when I was at nursery, I knew instinctively how to mix colours, how to make purple or orange.

You want to be a writer? Start writing. You want to be a filmmaker? Start shooting stuff on your phone right now.

I never had the exposure to techniques and so forth that children have today with art workshops, but I always had crayons and pencils and still have work going right back to when I was five or six years old.

I started writing seriously when I was a teenager, around 14 years old.

I've written poetry since I was a kid. As the years went on, I got into writing stories and screenplays, but I always, always kept up with poetry as well.

There are stories still in existence that I wrote when I was five. However, I did not get published until I was seven.

Films like 'Babel' can transcend the one point-of-view formula that has reigned for so long.

I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.

I wrote my first play when I was eight.

It seems like I've been writing since birth! I started writing poems before I got to school. I wrote the class musical in first grade - both words and music. It was about a bunch of vegetables who got together in a salad. I played the chief carrot!

I'm normal. I just had a different occupation for a while, and when you're in a different occupation, you have to carry yourself a different way. Most of my art is me bringing you stories from that era of my life. My life now is kind of boring.

I wrote my first story when I was six or seven.

I wanted to be a writer, to write these stories that would make people see the world in a different way. But I ended up going to business school because I thought I could ultimately get to where I wanted to go faster that way.

The first story I can remember writing, that I truly set down on paper, was a Christmas story that I wrote when I was ten years old.

I think one of the things that attracted me about theater and the stage was the ability to escape reality. And that is what I do in my work as a writer, but in a different way. And the freedom to put your own existence on ice and become another person.