Top 100 Quotes About Joyce Carol Oates
#2. I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.
Joyce Carol Oates
#3. When I was in college, I had the good fortune to have Joyce Carol Oates as my writing teacher. She told me that I could take an aspect of myself, and from that one bit of personality, I can create a character. This is what I have done, particularly in my novels.
Jonathan Ames
#4. I send all my short fiction to 'Ontario Review' because Joyce Carol Oates is associate editor there, and I think she's fantastic.
Janet Fitch
#5. I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.
Mohsin Hamid
#6. Unless you're Stephen King or Joyce Carol Oates, no one's going to recognize you on the street, and you're promoting your book, not yourself.
Debra Dean
#10. And we can read - there is always the prospect of escape, through books."
"Books are not a means of 'escape', Meta! Books are a means of knowledge, and of learning how to cope with the future.
Joyce Carol Oates
#11. Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.
Joyce Carol Oates
#13. On the way home Mary Lou said, "Some things are so sad you can't say them." But I pretended not to hear.
Joyce Carol Oates
#14. It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim.
Joyce Carol Oates
#15. 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
#16. [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
#17. Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.
Joyce Carol Oates
#18. Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.
Joyce Carol Oates
#19. I should say, one of the things about being a widow or a widower, you really, really need a sense of humor, because everything's going to fall apart.
Joyce Carol Oates
#20. Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive.
There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.
Joyce Carol Oates
#21. When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.
Joyce Carol Oates
#22. Most people think that a widow is inhabiting some elegiac world of - it's like Mozart's 'Requiem Mass.' You know, it's very beautiful and elevated thoughts and some measure of dignity. I didn't have that experience at all. I had one pratfall after another.
Joyce Carol Oates
#23. I compose most of my tweets with care, as if they were aphorisms - they are not usually dashed-off. Sometimes I'm surprised by the high, poetic quality of Twitter - it lends itself to a surreal sort of self-expression.
Joyce Carol Oates
#24. The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct
Joyce Carol Oates
#25. 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.
Joyce Carol Oates
#26. These are open secrets, so to speak. Of the kind we dare not articulate, for fear of wounding those close to us.
Joyce Carol Oates
#27. The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.
Joyce Carol Oates
#28. I used to think getting old was about vanity but actually it's about losing people you love.
Joyce Carol Oates
#29. REGINALD BURNABY THE GREAT (variously identified as a defrocked Roman Catholic priest from Galway, an ex-convict from Liverpool, if not an escaped convict from that seaport city)
Joyce Carol Oates
#30. 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
#32. Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.
Joyce Carol Oates
#34. Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer's vision.
Joyce Carol Oates
#35. Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.
Joyce Carol Oates
#36. No way of life so entrenched will ever 'wither away' - it must be helped, with dynamite, if need be.
Joyce Carol Oates
#38. 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
#39. Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?
If it were not for language, could we lie?
Joyce Carol Oates
#40. It simply fell from him, like a heavy overcoat he'd shrugged off, no longer needing its warmth or bulk to protect him.
Joyce Carol Oates
#44. In 'We Were the Mulvaneys,' animals are almost as important as people. I wanted to show the tenderness in our relationships with cats, dogs, and horses. Especially cats.
Joyce Carol Oates
#45. 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
#46. It's one of those secrets that's embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students.
Joyce Carol Oates
#47. It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing
how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are; because you've said them so many times, your 'principles,' your 'ideals'
and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.
Joyce Carol Oates
#48. The man is too narcissistic, too shallow and cowardly for suicide. Days
Joyce Carol Oates
#49. Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse.
Joyce Carol Oates
#50. After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.
Joyce Carol Oates
#51. If she lets us down, if she's weird sometimes - just ignore it, and love her. Just love her.
Joyce Carol Oates
#52. For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?
Joyce Carol Oates
#53. 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
#55. I do what I want to do. It was a brash statement of(her)girlhood. Now she was an adult, the boast seemed quaint. For rarely do you know what you want. Even after you've done it you can't say clearly if that was what you'd wanted or just something that happened to you, like weather.
Joyce Carol Oates
#57. The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.
Joyce Carol Oates
#58. The hopeful young author had no doubt that books might change the world.
Joyce Carol Oates
#59. 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
#61. The great happiness in life in creativity belongs to amateurs.
Joyce Carol Oates
#62. Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.
Joyce Carol Oates
#64. Time is the enemy of lovers. Worse even than the frank light of day.
Joyce Carol Oates
#67. No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.
Joyce Carol Oates
#68. For his part, the stranger was drifting in Annabel's direction, yet not very deliberately. As if, in some way, he were being drawn to her, by some (unconscious) motion or motive of Annabel herself. Why
Joyce Carol Oates
#69. I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.
Joyce Carol Oates
#70. 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
#71. It had given him a charge of entitlement and invincibility he would draw upon through life, like a limitless bank account.)
Joyce Carol Oates
#73. 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
#74. Time is the element in which we exist ... We are either borne along by it or drowned in it.
Joyce Carol Oates
#75. The suicide does not play the game, does not observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and leaves the other guests painfully uncomfortable.
Joyce Carol Oates
#76. Betrayal is the deepest wound. Betrayal is what remains of love, when love has gone.
Joyce Carol Oates
#77. 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
#78. When poets - write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane.
Joyce Carol Oates
#79. A familiar story, Marya instructs herself - a woman yearning to be completed in a man, by way of a man. As if she hadn't a soul of her own.
Joyce Carol Oates
#80. Her favorite foods made her gag, like old friends she hadn't seen in years turning up looking all wrong.
Joyce Carol Oates
#81. You don't understand! Gilbert turned his back on me, but he wouldn't have turned his back on God." Ariah
Joyce Carol Oates
#83. I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of 'working' at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of the word.
Joyce Carol Oates
#84. A diverse and lively collection, the highest art of the interview.
Joyce Carol Oates
#85. To be entranced, to be driven, to be obsessed, to be under the spell of an emerging, not quite fully 'comprehended' narrative
this is the greatest happiness of the writer's life even as it burns us out and exhausts us, unfitting us for the placid contours of 'normality.
Joyce Carol Oates
#86. 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
#87. Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.
Joyce Carol Oates
#88. The hard part of humanity is history. All that's been done to human beings by other human beings. In the Rocky River Nature Preserve you didn't have to think of such things.
Joyce Carol Oates
#89. 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
#91. I'm not bitter for they are telling me I am HISTORY
You wouldn't be bitter if you are HISTORY any of you
A MAN would not be bitter if entering History! nor should a WOMAN
Break my heart, better than break my nose (you bastards)
Revenge is SWEET (& I need to acquire that taste)
Joyce Carol Oates
#92. Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.
Joyce Carol Oates
#93. 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
#94. I haven't any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that I don't take a break for many hours - and consequently have breakfast at two or three in the afternoon on good days.
Joyce Carol Oates
#95. Of the widow's countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband's death the widow should think I kept myself alive.
Joyce Carol Oates
#96. The things that link us deepest, we can't feel.
Except if they're taken from us.
Joyce Carol Oates
#97. 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
#98. The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.
Joyce Carol Oates
#99. It may be that actual tears have stained the tile floors or soaked into the carpets of such places. It may be that these tears can never be removed. And everywhere the odor of melancholy, that is the very odor of memory.
Joyce Carol Oates
#100. I don't feel I write fast. I write in longhand and do so much revision. On the page, it's so old-fashioned. I could write a whole novel on scrap paper, scribbles and things. I keep looking at it and something develops. For me, using a word processor would mean staring at a screen for too many hours.
Joyce Carol Oates
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