“Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

Source: The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982

Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed." by Joyce Carol Oates?

Joyce Carol Oates photo

Joyce Carol Oates 89

American author 1938

Related quotes

“Nearly all men die of their remedies, and not of their illnesses.”

Molière (1622–1673) French playwright and actor

Presque tous les hommes meurent de leurs remèdes, et non pas de leurs maladies.
Le Malade Imaginaire (1673), Act III, sc. iii

“The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.”

Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer

Attributed by Banksy on Instagram (October 6, 2018): "The urge to destroy is also a creative urge" - Picasso https://www.instagram.com/p/BomXijJhArX/?hl=en&taken-by=banksy. This was actually written by anarchist philosopher Mikhail Bakunin in his essay "Reaction in Germany," in 1842.

Source: Moore, John (2004). I Am Not a Man, I Am Dynamite!: Friedrich Nietzsche and the Anarchist Tradition. Brooklyn NY: Autonomedia. p. 87.

Source: Lehning, Arthur, ed. (1973). Mikhail Bakunin: Selected Writings. London: Cape. p. 58.
Misattributed

“The best life is the one in which the creative impulses play the largest part and the possessive impulses the smallest.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1910s, Political Ideals (1917)

“If there's any illness for which people offer many remedies, you may be sure that particular illness is incurable, I think.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Act I
The Cherry Orchard (1904)

“Creative ideas flourish best in a shop which preserves some spirit of fun. Nobody is in business for fun, but that does not mean there cannot be fun in business.”

Leo Burnett (1891–1971) American advertising executive

Source: Communications of an Advertising Man (1961), p. 81

“What is wonderful about great literature is that it transforms the man who reads it towards the condition of the man who wrote, and brings to birth in us also the creative impulse.”

E.M. Forster (1879–1970) English novelist

"Anonymity: An Enquiry"
Source: Two Cheers for Democracy (1951)

“Every creative impulse is shadowed by a possessive impulse; even the aspirant to saintliness may be jealous of the more successful saint.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

“She was a do-gooder, which means that all the ill she did, she did without realizing it.”

Diane Setterfield book The Thirteenth Tale

Source: The Thirteenth Tale

“Basically America (the USA) is not a warmongering but simply a commercial society: war as the continuation of business by other means.”

Max Frisch (1911–1991) Swiss playwright and novelist

Drafts for a Third Sketchbook (2013)

“The world owes all its onward impulses to men ill at ease. The happy man inevitably confines himself within ancient limits.”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book The House of the Seven Gables

Source: The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Ch. XX : The Flower of Eden

Related topics