Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.

It's absolutely philistine not to recognize what a great book 'An American Dream' is. Norman Mailer is his own worst enemy, and if you don't catch him in a defensive position, he'll admit it. I'd really like to help that man.

I don't think you can ever assess your work. I don't think Turgenev could assess his any more than I can assess mine, and his didn't have a social impact as much as great literary impact.

The reason Saul Bellow doesn't talk to me anymore is because he knows his new novels are not worth reading.

Writers will be judged by what they write.

I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written.

I think the short story is a very underrated art form. We know that novels deserve respect.

You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

I cringe when critics say I'm a master of the popular novel. What's an unpopular novel?

Literature, of course, is not a contest.

I asked a French critic a couple of years ago why my books did so well in France. He said it was because in my novels people both act and think. I got a kick out of that.

Authors should be honored only for their works.

I used to distinguish between my fiction and nonfiction in terms of superiority or inferiority.

No writer must be measured by a word or paragraph. He is to be measured by his work - by the tendency, not of one line, but by the tendency of all.

You can write the best book you can, and that might still not be enough. Appeal isn't something that most writers can't strive for or identify. It's something even the best agents and editors can't always identify.

Writers themselves benefit from all helpful information about their task and methods. Readers, in turn, can have both their understanding and appreciation of literature enhanced by information about the writer's work.

Heinlein never had a best-seller. Even, I think, with Stranger in a Strange Land, I don't think it was actually on the New York Times best seller list.

When people talk about being a writer, the first words that come to mind are glamour and artistic parties like Charles Dickens used to mix cocktails for.

As a writer, you write the book, you give it to your editor, it's copy edited, it's published, it's thrown out there, and then there's a response.

Size has nothing to do with literature. All legs are long enough to touch the ground, and all books are big enough to fill their covers.

You can't really win as a Booker judge. If you choose the obvious names, the unit-shifters, you're accused of being timid and unimaginative; if you choose the unfamous, you're labelled willful and perverse.

Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.

All literature is gossip.

I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.

In a way you can feel that the poet actually is looking over your shoulder, and you say to yourself, now, how would this go for him? Would this do or not?