How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?
Joyce Carol OatesDon't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.
Joyce Carol OatesI never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.
Joyce Carol OatesI was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.
Joyce Carol Oates