Joyce Carol Oates Quotes About Reading

Quotes about: Reading

• Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Book, Reading, Mean

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

• Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Reading, Writing, Trying

• The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Spiritual, Reading, Eye

  Tavis Smiley interview, PBS, June 28, 2005.

• Whoever's reading this, if anyone is reading it: does it matter that our old selves are lost to us as surely as the past is lost, or is it enough to know yes we lived then, and we are living now, and the connection must be there? Like a river hundreds of miles long exists both at its source and at its mouth, simultaneously?

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Reading, Past, Self

  Joyce Carol Oates (1993). “Foxfire: confessions of a girl gang”, E P Dutton

• My first love was reading, which inspired me to write.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Reading, Writing, First Love

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

• Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Reading, Writing, Thinking

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

• I am more or less reading all the time.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Reading

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• That is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand this?

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Reading, Yield, Inspired

  Source: www.motherjones.com

• I am always reading or thinking about reading.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Reading, Thinking

• All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Reading, Writing, Ties Of Love

• I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Book, Reading, Book Reading

  Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art”, p.8, Zondervan

• I don't read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I'm also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Book, Reading, Awards

• the art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Art, Pain, Reading

  Joyce Carol Oates (1983). “The profane art: essays and reviews”, Dutton Adult

• I remember once asking Grandma about a book she was reading, a biography of Abraham Lincoln, and how she answered me: this was the first conversation of my life that concerned a book, and 'the life of the mind' - and now, such subjects have become my life.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Book, Grandma, Reading

• The other book that I worry no one reads anymore is James Joyce's Ulysses. It's not easy, but every page is wonderful and repays the effort. I started reading it in high school, but I wasn't really able to grasp it. Then I read it in college. I once spent six weeks in a graduate seminar reading it. It takes that long. That's the problem. No one reads that way anymore. People may spend a week with a book, but not six.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Book, Reading, School

  Interview with Amy Sutherland, www.bostonglobe.com. March 23, 2013.

• Yes, I've listened to just a few audiobooks - but hope to listen to more. I've wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening, and not reading, quite fascinating.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Book, Reading, Listening

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