Top 100 Joyce Carol Oates Quotes
#3. Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.
Joyce Carol Oates
#4. As long as you're in motion, your perspective is obscured. Only when you reach the summit and turn to look back, can you be at peace.
Joyce Carol Oates
#5. [I am] utterly entranced, at times, with the mere fact that there are other people, and that they experience themselves as the primary center of consciousness just as I do. That fact alone ... Well, that fact alone is staggering.
Joyce Carol Oates
#6. To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child, the whole tradition is lost.
Joyce Carol Oates
#7. No way of life so entrenched will ever 'wither away' - it must be helped, with dynamite, if need be.
Joyce Carol Oates
#8. 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
#9. Dorie herself was not very surprised, because a daydreamer is prepared for most things and in a way she had planned even this, though she had not guessed how it would come about.
Joyce Carol Oates
#10. Nor do I like being told upsetting news - unless there is a good reason. I can't help but feel that there is an element of cruelty, if not sadism, in friends telling one another upsetting things for no reason except to observe their reactions.
Joyce Carol Oates
#12. In our household, which was essentially under an evil spell, my father 'Chaplin' was all the magic. A great man draws magic into himself, like reverse lightning. There's nothing to spare for anyone else.
Joyce Carol Oates
#13. Time is the enemy of lovers. Worse even than the frank light of day.
Joyce Carol Oates
#15. The standards for horror fiction should be no less than those for 'serious literary' fiction in which originality of concept, depth of characters, and attentiveness to language are vitally important.
Joyce Carol Oates
#16. And remember: you must not overwork your body, or your soul. You must not enslave yourself, as you would not enslave any other person. You must be the custodian of your self.
Joyce Carol Oates
#17. Loving our parents, we bring them into us. They inhabit us. For a long time I believed that I could not bear to live without Mom and Dad - I could not bear to "outlive" them - for to be a daughter without parents did not seem possible to me.
Joyce Carol Oates
#18. You don't understand! Gilbert turned his back on me, but he wouldn't have turned his back on God." Ariah
Joyce Carol Oates
#19. The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.
Joyce Carol Oates
#20. Maybe he'd been mistaken, trying so hard to make his wife and young children happy. Maybe it's always a mistake, trying to assure the happiness of others.
Joyce Carol Oates
#21. What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She'd become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.
Joyce Carol Oates
#22. We begin as children imagining and fearing ghosts. By degrees, through our long lives, we come to be the very ghosts inhabiting the lost landscapes of our childhood.
Joyce Carol Oates
#23. While madness in individuals is relatively rare, it is virtually a prerequisite for a certain sort of political leader.
Joyce Carol Oates
#25. For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.
Joyce Carol Oates
#27. Love is an indescribable sensation - perhaps a conviction, a sense of certitude.
Joyce Carol Oates
#28. Princeton is quite integrated. Women are professors at Princeton. Women are students at Princeton. That began in the 1970s.
Joyce Carol Oates
#29. Childhood is the province of the imagination and when I immerse myself in it, I re-create it as it was, as it could have been, as I wanted - and didn't want - it to be.
Joyce Carol Oates
#30. How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into elastic patterns called "sentences." And these sentences into paragraphs, and beyond.
Joyce Carol Oates
#31. Grip of Paradox. A predatory bird with a great sharp beak and vicious talons - Paradox. To be in its grip is to suffer, yet so exquisitely, one might mistake the experience for a kind of ecstasy.
Joyce Carol Oates
#32. But you are a solace just by existing, vividly in my thoughts if not here before me.
Joyce Carol Oates
#33. For some reason, voters can be brainwashed, and they vote sometimes against their own best interests, let alone voting against the interests of people who need them, like people who are disenfranchised and people who are poor and so forth.
Joyce Carol Oates
#34. When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.
Joyce Carol Oates
#36. Our house is made of glass ... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.
Joyce Carol Oates
#38. Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.
Joyce Carol Oates
#41. God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.
Joyce Carol Oates
#43. After my husband died, I could not write much - I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time even to contemplate writing. But I did take notes - not for fiction, but for a journal, or diary, of this terrible time. I did not think that I would ever survive this interlude.
Joyce Carol Oates
#45. If you blunder by accident into a secret it's like you've pushed open a door where you thought was just a wall. You can look through, if you're brave or reckless enough you can even step inside-taking a chance what you'll learn is worth what it costs.
Joyce Carol Oates
#46. The politics of the day infuriated him: even when power lay with the politicians he supported, and the opposition appeared to be failing, so much in the political sphere seemed to him vile, vulgar, meretricious, inane - he threatened that he wouldn't be voting at all. The
Joyce Carol Oates
#47. Running! If there is any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I cannot think of what it might be.
Joyce Carol Oates
#48. Stalwart Zeno seemed oblivious, that faith in his daughter being alive after more than forty days did not compute with faith that Brett Kincaid would soon be arrested for a crime involving his daughter.
Joyce Carol Oates
#50. Now the broken-off parts of her life, the fragments, bits, puzzle pieces, began to fall into place, to assemble themselves, as invariably they do once we are under the enchantment of Death.
Joyce Carol Oates
#52. You who are non-believers rely upon us, to confirm your sense of superiority. You need to imagine us as unchanged, unchangeable.
Joyce Carol Oates
#53. Did you know, Marianne: how by breaking the code that day, you broke it forever? For us all?
Joyce Carol Oates
#54. At such rare times you can feel the electrically charged neurons of the prefrontal brain realigning themselves like iron fillings drawn by a magnet.
Joyce Carol Oates
#55. The writer understands how deeply mysterious the 'familiar' really is. How strangely opaque, what we've seen a thousand times. And how inconsolable a loss, when the taken-for-granted is finally taken from us.
Joyce Carol Oates
#56. As if whoever it was held that camera was her closest friend. Or maybe it was the camera that was her closest friend.
Joyce Carol Oates
#57. Any kind of creative activity is likely to be stressful. The more anxiety, the more you feel that you are headed in the right direction. Easiness, relaxation, comfort - these are not conditions that usually accompany serious work.
Joyce Carol Oates
#58. Love you in that cheerleader's costume. Last Friday. You didn't see me I guess. But I was there.
Joyce Carol Oates
#59. Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live' - the Americans understand this admonition, deep in their killer-souls.
Joyce Carol Oates
#60. Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.
Joyce Carol Oates
#61. I know that there are many essential biological differences between the sexes, of course. But not so many 'culturally-mandated' differences. In First World countries we've evolved beyond mere biology -it isn't the fate of the human female to be pregnant continously until she wears out and dies.
Joyce Carol Oates
#63. As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my 'farm chores' - but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.
Joyce Carol Oates
#64. How lawyers make work for one another! You're all priests, worshipping the same god. No wonder you adore one another.
Joyce Carol Oates
#65. Men grow cold as girls grow old
And we all lose our charms in the end.
How prettily Lorelei Lee sang these mordant lyrics!
Joyce Carol Oates
#66. You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.
Joyce Carol Oates
#67. A woman who has lost her husband is invalid, thus an invalid. In
Joyce Carol Oates
#68. What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.
Joyce Carol Oates
#70. A writer who has published as many books as I have has developed, of necessity, a hide like a rhino's, while inside there dwells a frail, hopeful butterfly of a spirit.
Joyce Carol Oates
#71. The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.
Joyce Carol Oates
#72. If a book I've committed myself to review turns out to be 'disappointing' I make an effort to present it objectively to the reader, including a good number of excerpts from the text, so that the reader might form his or her own opinion independent of my own.
Joyce Carol Oates
#73. I think we are all cats with nine lives, or even more. We must rejoice in our elusive catness.
Joyce Carol Oates
#74. I think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let other people speak ... to travel ... to experience the world. And memorialize it.
Joyce Carol Oates
#75. Unyielding - Oh Norma Jeane leads a crazy life, you see - she has a former husband very jealous of her - he is her "ex" but he is
Joyce Carol Oates
#76. Loneliness is dangerous ... because if aloneness does not lead to God, it leads to the devil. It leads to the self.
Joyce Carol Oates
#77. She had paid for these mistakes. (Had she?) But still, you are never fully acquitted of any mistake that involves another, and so the Intern had not been fully acquitted of her mistakes, and her shame of such mistakes.
Joyce Carol Oates
#78. One man's insanity is another man's genius; someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity.
Joyce Carol Oates
#79. I have so many favorite writers, it's very hard to select a few ... of classic writers, I have always admired Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau.
Joyce Carol Oates
#80. Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.
Joyce Carol Oates
#81. A writer's life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.
Joyce Carol Oates
#82. If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.
Joyce Carol Oates
#83. People who are disenfranchised politically and people who are poor often don't vote. They often don't elect politicians, so the politicians who are supporting them are really being very charitable, because they're not going to give them billions of dollars in campaign funds.
Joyce Carol Oates
#84. It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.
Joyce Carol Oates
#85. if a man hurts you, and you show that hurt, and your eyes lock with his, he will never forgive you. For always you will be the girl he has hurt, which means you are the girl he can always hurt again. Mr.
Joyce Carol Oates
#86. I haven't the faintest idea what my royalties are. I haven't the faintest idea how many copies of books sold, or how many books that I've written. I could look these things up; I have no interest in them. I don't know how much money I have. There are a lot of things I just don't care about.
Joyce Carol Oates
#87. Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?
Joyce Carol Oates
#88. The secret of being a writer: not to expect others to value what you've done as you value it. Not to expect anyone else to perceive in it the emotions you have invested in it. Once this is understood, all will be well.
Joyce Carol Oates
#90. For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.
Joyce Carol Oates
#91. But this controversy did not involve the corporal who refused to give thought to what his life had become as a case. God did not think of a man as a case. For a case is to be solved - and a man cannot be solved.
Joyce Carol Oates
#93. Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there.
Joyce Carol Oates
#95. I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.
Joyce Carol Oates
#96. Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really experience a text until you've taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.
Joyce Carol Oates
#97. You could be thoroughly an intellectual while not surrendering maleness; you could not be so totally intellectual and not surrender some degree of femaleness.
Joyce Carol Oates
#98. This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash.
Joyce Carol Oates
#99. The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.
Joyce Carol Oates
#100. And what is 'art'? - a firestorm rushing through Time, arising from no visible source and conforming to no principles of logic or causality.
Joyce Carol Oates
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
