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Joyce Carol Oates Quotes | Quotes said by Joyce Carol Oates

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #1

    -So you don't believe we have souls I guess? and Legs laughed and said, Yeah probably we do but why's that mean we're gonna last forever? 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 Quote #2

    . . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #3

    A daydreamer is prepared for most things.

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #4

    A fear of the unknown: what was that called?
    Worse yet: a fear of the known.

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #5

    A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #6

    A wet autumn morning, a garbage truck clattering down the street. The first snowfall of the season, blossom sized flakes falling languidly and melting on teh ground, a premature snow fall delicate as lace, rapidly melting.

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #7

    Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man's body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don't don't don't don't leave me. DON'T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased.

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #8

    Among many of my friends and acquaintances, I seem to be one of the very few individuals who felt or feels no ambivalence about my mother. All my feelings for my mother were positive, very strong and abiding.

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #9

    And I like your laugh, Sabbath; it’s inaudible.

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #10

    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 Quote #11

    And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #12

    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 Quote #13

    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 Quote #14

    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 Quote #15

    As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #16

    Be daring, take on anything. Don’t labor over little cameo works in which every word is to be perfect. Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #17

    Because nothing between human beings is uncomplicated and there's no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them.

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #18

    Boxing has become America's tragic theater.

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #19

    Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #20

    But he doesn't love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love--the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn't happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one another's faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn't happen.

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #21

    Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art.

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #22

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

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #23

    Death is just the last scene of the last act.

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #24

    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 Quote #25

    Fiction that adds up, that suggests a logical consistency, or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #26

    For in America this season is decreed “family season”. (Eat your hearts out, you pitiable loners who don’t have families!) Melancholy as Thanksgiving is, the Christmas-New year’s season is far worse and lasts far longer, providing rich fund of opportunities for self-medicating, mental collapse, suicide and public mayhem with firearms. In fact it might be argued that the Christmas-New year’s season which begins abruptly after Thanksgiving is now the core-sason of American life itself, the meaning of American life„ the brute existencial point of it.
    How without families must envy us who bask in parental love, in the glow of yule-logs burning in fireplaces stoked by our daddie’s robust pokers, we who are stuffed to bursting with our mummie’s frantic holiday cooking; how you wish you could be us, pampered/protected kids tearing expensive foil wrappings off too many packages to count, gathered about the Christmas tree on Christmas morning as Mummy gently chided: “Skyler! Bliss! Show Daddy and Mummy what you’ve just opened, please! And save the little cards, so you know who gave such nice things to you

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #27

    For in America this season is decreed “family season”. (Eat your hearts out, you pitiable loners who don’t have families!) Melancholy as Thanksgiving is, the Christmas-New year’s season is far worse and lasts far longer, providing rich fund of opportunities for self-medicating, mental collapse, suicide and public mayhem with firearms. In fact it might be argued that the Christmas-New year’s season which begins abruptly after Thanksgiving is now the core-sason of American life itself, the meaning of American life„ the brute existencial point of it.
    How without families must envy us who bask in parental love, in the glow of yule-logs burning in fireplaces stoked by our daddie’s robust pokers, we who are stuffed to bursting with our mummie’s frantic holiday cooking; how you wish you could be us, pampered/protected kids tearing expensive foil wrappings off too many packages to count, gathered about the Christmas tree on Christmas morning as Mummy gently chided: “Skyler! Bliss! Show Daddy and Mummy what you’ve just opened, please! And save the little cards, so you know who gave such nice things to you”.

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #28

    For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

  • Joyce Carol Oates Quote #29

    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 Quote #30

    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.

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