Joyce Carol Oates Quotes About Art

Quotes about: Art

• Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Writing, Creative

  Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art”, p.12, Zondervan

• My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Comforting, Wish

• I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Writing, Thinking

  "Joyce Carol Oates: 'I had a dream about a woman whose make-up was dried and cracking, she made a fool of herself'". Interview with Tim Adams, www.theguardian.com. February 25, 2012.

• Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Civilization, Literature

  Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “Expensive People”, p.72, Modern Library

• The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Doubt, Overcoming

  Joyce Carol Oates (2007). “The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982”, Ecco

• I believe that any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression. ... Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it. The more original and unsettling their art, the more devastating the punishment.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Believe, Punishment

• I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called 'culture' - and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Strong, Art, Believe

  Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art”, p.1, Zondervan

• The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day-a way of relating.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Technique, Pages

• I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Giving Up, Writing

  Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Milazzo (1989). “Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates”, p.66, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• Art is the highest expression of the human spirit.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Expression, Spirit

  Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art”, p.1, Zondervan

• And what is 'art'? - a firestorm rushing through Time, arising from no visible source and conforming to no principles of logic or causality.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Rushing, Causality

  Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art”, p.154, Zondervan

• Writing is the most solitary of arts.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Writing, Solitary

  Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art”, p.11, Zondervan

• One of the qualities of writing that is not much stressed is its problem-solving aspect, having to do with the presentation of material: how to structure it, what sort of sentences (direct, elliptical, simple or compound, syntactically elaborate), what tone (in art, "tone" is everything), pacing. Paragraphing is a way of dramatization, as the look of a poem on a page is dramatic; where to break lines, where to end sentences.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Writing, Simple

  "Writing Lessons From the Madly Prolific Joyce Carol Oates". Interview with Alexander Sammon, www.motherjones.com. September 10, 2016.

• Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsessions, to resist what is, to defy one's elders, even to the point of ostracism; to define oneself, and by extension one's generation, as new, novel, ungovernable.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Generations, Ostracism

  Joyce Carol Oates (1999). “Where I've Been, and where I'm Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose”, Plume Books

• I don't think that any 'ism' is higher than literature or art. So I'm a formalist. I greatly honor and respect the form of a work.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Thinking, Honor And Respect

• There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it's gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Character, May

  "Off the Page: Joyce Carol Oates". The WashingtonPost Interview, www.washingtonpost.com. October 24, 2003.

• Art originates in play - in improvisation, experiment, and fantasy; it remains forever, in its deepest instincts, playful and spontaneous, an exercise of the imagination analogous to the exercising of the physical body to no purpose other than ecstatic release.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Exercise, Play

  Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art”, p.39, Zondervan

• Art is a means of memorialization of the past, a record of a rapidly vanishing world; a means of exorcising, at least temporarily, the ravages of homesickness. To speak of 'what is past, or passing or to come'-in the most meticulous language thereby to assure its permanence; to honor those we've loved and learned from and must outlive.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Mean, Past

• Great art is cathartic; it is always moral.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Moral, Great Art

• At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Country, Art, Half

  Joyce Carol Oates' address to graduating class at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, May 28, 2006.

• Just as our historical beginnings are utterly mysterious-why are we born? why when and as we are?-so too are the beginnings of works of art and of "artists.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Historical, Mysterious

  Joyce Carol Oates (1989). “(Woman) writer: occasions and opportunities”, Plume

• The greatest works of literature seem to embody both "art" and "morality".

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Literature, Morality

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• Self-criticism is an art not many are qualified to practice.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Self, Practice

  Joyce Carol Oates (1989). “(Woman) writer: occasions and opportunities”, Plume

• Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real life is a disappointment. That's why we have art.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Dream, Art, Disappointment

  Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Milazzo (1989). “Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates”, p.16, Univ. Press of Mississippi

• We come away from the tragedies of [William] Shakespeare with a profound sense of having encountered reality in its most pristine form - yet the art-work is elaborately artificial, the very genre of tragedy in poetry an anti-naturalist perspective.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Reality, Profound

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