"If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space"
About this Quote
Writing, for Joyce Carol Oates, isn’t a job you clock into; it’s a mental architecture you carry everywhere. The “wall of silence” sounds monkish, even antisocial, but she’s naming something more practical and slightly eerie: the writer’s ability to split the self. One part of you performs the ordinary (driving, folding laundry), the other keeps listening for language, rehearsing scenes, turning irritation into dialogue. Silence isn’t just the absence of noise; it’s a protective barrier against the world’s constant bids for attention.
The intent here feels defensive in the best sense. Oates is legitimizing the invisible labor that non-writers often dismiss as daydreaming or distraction. The subtext: a writer’s life is not made by aesthetic rituals or picturesque solitude, but by a sustained inner privacy. That “space” is both sanctuary and constraint. It implies discipline (you’re always on) and a kind of permanent remove from experience (you’re never fully offstage). Even pleasure becomes raw material.
Context matters: Oates is famously prolific, a public emblem of output and stamina. This line reads like her operating system. The wall explains how productivity happens without romanticizing it: writing isn’t waiting for inspiration, it’s maintaining a continuous interior room where sentences can form while the body does chores.
It also hints at a trade-off. To cultivate that space is to accept a certain loneliness, a chosen insulation. The writer moves through the world half-hidden, not because she hates it, but because she’s always converting it.
The intent here feels defensive in the best sense. Oates is legitimizing the invisible labor that non-writers often dismiss as daydreaming or distraction. The subtext: a writer’s life is not made by aesthetic rituals or picturesque solitude, but by a sustained inner privacy. That “space” is both sanctuary and constraint. It implies discipline (you’re always on) and a kind of permanent remove from experience (you’re never fully offstage). Even pleasure becomes raw material.
Context matters: Oates is famously prolific, a public emblem of output and stamina. This line reads like her operating system. The wall explains how productivity happens without romanticizing it: writing isn’t waiting for inspiration, it’s maintaining a continuous interior room where sentences can form while the body does chores.
It also hints at a trade-off. To cultivate that space is to accept a certain loneliness, a chosen insulation. The writer moves through the world half-hidden, not because she hates it, but because she’s always converting it.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
|---|
More Quotes by Joyce
Add to List
