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Constant interruptions are the destruction of imagination.

— Joyce Carol Oates

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Imagination

More quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

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.

Address at Mount Holyoke College (2006)

When people say there is too much violence in [my books], what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.

Prose — it might be speculated — is discourse; poetry ellipsis.

Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

All Joyce Carol Oates quotes →

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Some of my youthful readers are developing wonderful imaginations. This pleases me.

L. Frank Baum Introduction to The Lost Princess of Oz (1917)

There is an inverse relationship between imagination and money.

Alan Moore

An active imagination may find a bad tendency arising out of every transaction between imperfect morals.

Edward Hall Alderson Brownlow v. Egerton (1854)

Nothing is more dangerous to reason than the flights of the imagination, and nothing has been the occasion of more mistakes among philosophers.

David Hume A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Joyce Carol Oates (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.