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"When writing goes painfully, when it's hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)"then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly"why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing."
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Exlpore more Creativity quotes
"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."
"Never to rush something I was creating, but instead let it come into being as if it had a soul of it's own."
"A poet is someone who never forgets they were born naked."
"For art to exist, for any sort of aesthetic activity or perception to exist, a certain physiological precondition is indispensable: intoxication."
"On the whole, stories don't write themselves."
"The first time I saw a mermaid in my dream, and she looked so real...THAT.'s fishy!!"
"You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page."
"Be an artist, in whatever little faculty possible.For the Earth, without 'Art' is just 'Eh"
"What doesn't kill me provides writing material."
Explore more quotes by Joyce Carol Oates
"A wet autumn morning, a garbage truck clattering down the street. The first snowfall of the season, blossom sized flakes falling languidly and melting on teh ground, a premature snow fall delicate as lace, rapidly melting."
"How strange it is, to be walking away. Is it possible that I am really going to leave Ray-here? Is it possible that he won't be coming home with me in another day or two, as we'd planned? Such a thought is too profound for me to grasp. It's like fitting a large unwieldy object in a small space. My brain hurts, trying to contain it."
"He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul."
"You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else--an adult, an animal."
"The city reeked of death, and the savages that resided within its imposing starkness existed in fear of their lives. They had been shocked by the recent bloody Whitechapel murders, as if starvation, disease, moral degradation, and perpetual smog drowning all color in gray wasn't enough to bring home the pathetic reality of their miserable existence. The police were no nearer to capturing the monster that lurked in the crevices, and London seemed stiller in the dark, the streets devoid of hope."
"Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves."
"Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning."
"The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!"
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