Joyce Carol Oates Quotes:

For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.

Topics: Memories, Choices, Action, Moral Action

Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms.

Topics: Interesting, Sometimes, Reviews

Great art is cathartic; it is always moral.

Topics: Art, Moral, Great Art, Cathartic

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (2007). “The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982”, Ecco

Topics: Lovely, Looks, World

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (1989). “(Woman) writer: occasions and opportunities”, Plume

Topics: Reading, Book, Mean, Books And Reading, Writing And Reading

I never change, I simply become more myself.

Topics: Never Change

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art”, p.24, Zondervan

Topics: Writing, Apology, Want

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

Topics: Editors, Sympathetic, Critics

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

source: - Ten rules for writing fiction (part two) by Hilary Mantel, Michael Moorcock, Michael Morpurgo, Andrew Motion, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx, Philip Pullman, Ian Rankin, Will Self, Helen Simpson, Zadie Smith, Colm Tóibín, Rose Tremain, Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson, www.theguardian.com. February 19, 2010.

Topics: Heart, Light, Hopeful

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.

Topics: Evil, Victim, Attractive, Accomplices

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Milazzo (1989). “Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates”, p.65, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Topics: Writing, Soul, Cards, Playing Cards

Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.

Topics: Running, Thinking, Imagination, Distance Running

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.

Topics: Work, Luck, Belief

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.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (1993). “Foxfire: confessions of a girl gang”, E P Dutton

Topics: Change, Time, Tunnels, Sudden Realization

"Because there has been no one to stop me" has been one of the principles of my life.

Topics: Life, Principles

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.

Topics: Artist, People, Personality

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.

Topics: Wall, Writing, Space, Housework

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

source: - "Invented symbols". www.nytimes.com. January 05, 2006.

Topics: Humility, Passion, Forget, Homo Sapiens

The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (1998). “The Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque”, E P Dutton

Topics: Life, Memorable, Unrequited Love, Enough Love

Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be. In running the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.

Topics: Running, Thinking, Feet

Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.

Topics: Loneliness, Realizing, Hungry, Starvation

I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing--for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it's impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.

Topics: Life, Boxing, Determined

Art does the same things dreams do. We have a hunger for dreams and art fulfills that hunger. So much of real life is a disappointment. That's why we have art.

Topics: Dream, Art, Disappointment

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

Topics: Inspiring, Creativity, Mean

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.

Topics: Suicide, Party, Grieving

It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we really are.

I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space- who else?

Topics: Space, Juncture, Standing

If you explore beneath shyness or party chit-chat, you can sometimes turn a dull exchange into an intriguing one. I've found this to be particularly true in the case of professors or intellectuals, who are full of fascinating information, but need encouragement before they'll divulge it.

Topics: Encouragement, Party, Needs, Divulge, Chit Chat

Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.

Topics: Art, Writing, Creative

I don't think that writer's block exists really. I think that when you're trying to do something prematurely, it just won't come. Certain subjects just need time, as I've learned over and over again. You've got to wait before you write about them.

Topics: Block, Writing, Thinking

Only when men are connected to large, universal goals are they really happy-and one result of their happiness is a rush of creative activity.

Topics: Creativity, Men, Goal

Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.

Topics: Dream, Writing, Thinking

Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.

Topics: Art, Civilization, Literature

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.

Topics: Morning, Good Day, Writing

I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Milazzo (1989). “Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates”, p.74, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Topics: Believe, Belief, Always Believe

Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.

Topics: Mind, Technique, Reader

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.

Topics: Dirty, Noses, Firsts

The mere passage of time makes us all exiles.

Topics: Philosophical, Passage Of Time, Passages

The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn't there something reassuring about it! -- that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another's eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms -- nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?

Topics: Eye, Loss, Color, Drained, Lament

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt.

Topics: Art, Doubt, Overcoming

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.

Topics: Consistency, Add, Fiction

You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter.

Topics: Morning, Thinking, Years

Writers and artists never pay attention to advice given by their elders, quite rightly. The only worthwhile advice is the most general: 'Keep trying, don't give up, don't be discouraged, don't pay attention to detractors.' Everyone knows this.

Topics: Giving Up, Artist

The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct

Topics: Stars, Past, Light

A daydreamer is prepared for most things.

Topics: Prepared

Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.

Topics: Hurt, Survival, Monument

The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.

Topics: Daughter, Mother, Children

I'm drawn to failure. I feel that I'm contending with it constantly in my own life.

Topics: Feels

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.

Topics: Sight, Optics, Illusion

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

Topics: Invisible, Advantage

Maybe, love is always forgiveness, to a degree.

Topics: Love Is, Degrees, Maybe Love

Your punishment if you're a woman. Not loved enough.

Topics: Punishment, Enough

The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.

Topics: Challenges, Moral, Idiot, Happy Place

Death is just the last scene of the last act.

Topics: Acting, Lasts, Scene

I write so much because my cat sits on my lap. She purrs so I don't want to get up. She's so much more calming than my husband.

Topics: Husband, Cat, Writing

There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it.

source: - "A Widow’s Story" by Joyce Carol Oates, www.newyorker.com. December 13, 2010.

Topics: Grief, Forever, Bereavement

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.

Topics: Girl, Sides, Woods, Farm Girl

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

Topics: Memories, Blood, Language

I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.

Topics: Art, Writing, Thinking, Juncture

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

Topics: Boxing, Religion, Celebration, Masculinity, Boxing Champions

In love there are two things - bodies and words.

Topics: Love, Romantic Love, Two

Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.

Topics: Science, Law, Divinity, Laws Of Physics

The cleaning is something I use as a reward if I get some work done. I go into a very happy state of mind when I'm vacuuming.

Topics: Mind, Rewards, Use

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

Topics: Food, Writing, Poetry Is

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.

Topics: Anxiety, Creative, Relaxation, Serious Work, Easiness

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

Topics: Night, Light, Desert, Turned Off

There is nothing "ordinary" about reality.

source: - "Writing Lessons From the Madly Prolific Joyce Carol Oates". Interview with Alexander Sammon, www.motherjones.com. September 10, 2016.

Topics: Reality, Ordinary

Art is the highest expression of the human spirit.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art”, p.1, Zondervan

Topics: Art, Expression, Spirit

My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.

Topics: Art, Comforting, Wish

Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.

Topics: Glasses, House, Made

Loneliness is dangerous ... because if aloneness does not lead to God, it leads to the devil. It leads to the self.

Topics: Loneliness, Self, Devil

Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.

Topics: Eye, Mind, Imagine

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be

Topics: People, Might, Reason

Evil isn't a cosmological riddle, only just selfish human behavior.

source: - "Crime and Punishment". www.nytimes.com. September 19, 1999.

Topics: Selfish, Evil, Behavior

We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once it’s gone – its value is incontestable.

source: - "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

Topics: Gone, Sacred, Moments

I work very slowly. It's like building a ladder, where you're building your own ladder rung by rung, and you're climbing the ladder. It's not the best way to build a ladder, but I don't know any other way.

Topics: Climbing, Ladders, Way, Climbing The Ladder

People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.

Topics: People, Might, Pages

Ultimately, we measure ourselves against our own ideas of idealism and perfection, and we don't always come very close to them.

source: - Source: www.achievement.org

Topics: Ideas, Perfection, Idealism

Much in our lives is chance.

source: - "Writing Lessons From the Madly Prolific Joyce Carol Oates". Interview with Alexander Sammon, www.motherjones.com. September 10, 2016.

Topics: Chance, Life Is, Our Lives

Tragedy is the highest form of art.

Topics: Art, Tragedy, Form

I believe that the creative impulse is natural in all human beings, and that it is particularly powerful in children unless it is suppressed. Consequently, one is behaving normally and instinctively and healthily when one is creating - literature, art, music, or whatever. An excellent cook is also creative! I am disturbed that a natural human inclination [creative work] should, by some Freudian turn of phrase, be considered compulsive - perhaps even pathological. To me this is a complete misreading of the human enterprise. One should also enjoy one's work, and look forward to it daily.

Topics: Art, Children, Powerful, Misreading

The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.

Topics: Struggle, Brain, Hills

My writing is full of lives I might have led.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Milazzo (1989). “Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates”, p.152, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Topics: Writing, Might

When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Milazzo (1989). “Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates”, p.65, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Topics: Lying, Long, Stories

There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You're dead, yet alive. There's no sensation so exquisite.

Topics: Believe, Sleep, Greek

Insomniac is an impassioned work-an inspired amalgam of academic and first-hand research, memoir, analysis, and the kind of obsessive brooding we associate with the insomniac state. Much here is fascinating, and much is upsetting; here is a cri de coeur from a lifetime insomniac that is sure to appeal to the vast army of fellow insomniacs the world over.

Topics: Army, Hands, Upset, Insomniac

Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.

source: - "A Widow’s Story" by Joyce Carol Oates, www.newyorker.com. December 13, 2010.

Topics: Loneliness, Writing, Hazards, Autonomy

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.

Topics: Memories, Mean, Doe

Perhaps the inevitable tragedy of our complex civilization is that we must be specialists in our fields - and our fields have become increasingly difficult, so that communication is nearly impossible.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (2006). “Joyce Carol Oates: Conversations, 1970-2006”

Topics: Communication, Civilization, Tragedy, Specialists, Specialization

I don't read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I'm also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.

Topics: Book, Reading, Awards

The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.

Topics: Reality, Economic, Subtlety

And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (1990). “I Lock My Door Upon Myself”, New York : Ecco Press

Topics: Mother, Eye, World, Bad Mother, Being A Good Mother

Art is about freedom of expression, and should not be molded to fit any propaganda or lofty ideal.

source: - Source: www.motherjones.com

Topics: Art, Expression, Fit

It must happen to everyone. The last time you make love, you can't know it will be the last.

Topics: Broken Heart, Love You, Making Love

Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.

Topics: Eye, Bridges, Crosses

It feels good, honey, but it isn't love.

Topics: Feel Good, Honey, Feels

while there are 'women writers' there are not, and have never been, 'men writers.' This is an empty category, a class without specimens; for the noun 'writer' - the very verb 'writing' - always implies masculinity.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (1989). “(Woman) writer: occasions and opportunities”, Plume

Topics: Writing, Men, Class

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.

Topics: Freedom, Writing, Men, Pseudonyms

Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.

source: - "Writing Lessons From the Madly Prolific Joyce Carol Oates". Interview with Alexander Sammon, www.motherjones.com. September 10, 2016.

Topics: Stories, Return, Novel

I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “I Am No One You Know: And Other Stories”, p.45, Zondervan

Topics: Water, Facts, Misery

Near the point of impact, time acelerates to the speed of light.

Topics: Time, Impact, Light, Speed Of Light

Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense.

Topics: Memories, Writing, Ghost

Self-criticism, like self-administered brain surgery, is perhaps not a good idea. Can the 'self' see the 'self' with any objectivity?

Topics: Objectivity, Ideas, Self, Self Criticism, Brain Surgery

Look at the world and see what's there. It's very beautiful. It's a very exciting but in some ways treacherous world, and all this goes into the writing.

source: - Source: www.achievement.org

Topics: Beautiful, Writing, Looks

The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

Topics: Writing, Silence, Use, Use Of Language

There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.

Topics: Past, Knows

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Milazzo (1989). “Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates”, p.63, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Topics: Book, Writing, Order, Young Writers

All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later.

Topics: Reading, Writing, Ties Of Love, Forging

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.

Topics: Might, Absurd, Lost

It's always a challenge to discover the most effective first sentence, and the most effective final sentence, in a chapter for instance, and in the book as a whole.

source: - "Writing Lessons From the Madly Prolific Joyce Carol Oates". Interview with Alexander Sammon, www.motherjones.com. September 10, 2016.

Topics: Book, Challenges, Finals

The only people who claim that money is not important are people who have enough money so that they are relieved of the ugly burden of thinking about it.

Topics: Money, Thinking, People, Relieved

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.

Topics: War, People, Extinction

Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.

Topics: Our Love, Impossible, Imagine

Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.

Topics: Remember Something, Facts, Difficult

Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.

Topics: Character, Should Have, Stories

It's a taboo subject. How the dead are betrayed by the living. We who are living--we who have survived--understand that our guilt is what links us to the dead. At all times we can hear them calling to us, a growing incredulity in their voices, You will not forget me -- will you? How can you forget me? I have no one but you.

Topics: Voice, Guilt, Calling, Incredulity

The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it won't last; nothing can guarantee it.

Topics: Marriage, Wedding, Guarantees

An actress wants to be seen. An actress wants to be loved. By multitudes of people, not just one lone man.

Topics: Men, People, Want, Lone

I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.

Topics: Long Ago, Long, Exciting

All actors are whores. They want only one thing: to seduce you.

Topics: Actors, Want, Seducing

Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.

Topics: Night, Scott Fitzgerald, Fables, Best Novel, Tender Is The Night

I'm very American in the sense of being an explorer. America is filled with people who are interested in exploring landscapes, either external or internal. A westward nation of explorers.

source: - Source: www.achievement.org

Topics: America, People, Landscape

A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.

source: - "Joyce Carol Oates interviews herself". www.washingtonpost.com. September 13, 2013.

Topics: Life Is

The regional voice is the universal voice.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art”, p.1, Zondervan

Topics: Voice, Universal

the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (1984). “Wild Saturday, and Other Stories”

Topics: Church Service, Church, Backgrounds

The act of sending a letter is an act of generosity, even if, in retrospect, it might seem reckless. Why regret one's generosity? Why regret one's impulsiveness, one's misjudgment of others? The inevitable discovery that someone is selling letters you'd written in trust is simply to discover an obvious human truth: there are those who don't cherish us as we'd cherished them, and had wished to be cherished by them.

Topics: Regret, Discovery, Generosity

Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.

Topics: Writing, Materials, Knows

I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I've written.

Topics: My Time, Revising, Written

For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.

Topics: Revenge, Ordinary, World

If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.

Topics: Reality, Differences, World

He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “Faithless: Tales of Transgression”, p.30, Harper Collins

Topics: Women, Ugly, Matter

At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (1989). “(Woman) writer: occasions and opportunities”, Plume

Topics: Knowing, Want, Speak, Crucial Moments, Moments In Our Lives

I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called 'culture' - and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art”, p.1, Zondervan

Topics: Strong, Art, Believe

Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.

Topics: Children, Lasts, Our Family

She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, "Why are you trying to starve yourself?" To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all.

Topics: Numbness, Lust, Feelings

You don't have to understand why anything that has happened nor do you even have to understand what it is that has happened. You have only to live with the remains.

Topics: Remains, Happened

Is there any mystery like who you finally turn out to be.

Topics: Maturity, Mystery, Turns

Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsessions, to resist what is, to defy one's elders, even to the point of ostracism; to define oneself, and by extension one's generation, as new, novel, ungovernable.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (1999). “Where I've Been, and where I'm Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose”, Plume Books

Topics: Art, Generations, Ostracism

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

source: - "Master Race" by William Phillips in Partisan Review 50th Anniversary Edition, 1985.

Topics: Enemy, Tradition, Savior, Superficiality

You cultivate the subconscious by meditation, by sitting in silence and by not trying to control your thoughts. Then go someplace where you haven't been before, or go for a walk, a run, and look for signs of grace-an epiphany, something that comes to you.

Topics: Running, Silence, Meditation, Sitting In Silence

I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “I Am No One You Know: And Other Stories”, p.94, Zondervan

Topics: Causes, Results, Evidence

These are the moments for which we live.

Topics: Moments

Exotic: meaning you're "desired." For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.

Topics: Sexy, Long, Seductive

...failure is a human condition, not victory over odds; for each Hellen Keller who triumphs, there are tens of millions who fail, mute and deaf and insensate as vegetables tossed upon a vast garbage pile to rot.

Topics: Odds, Vegetables, Victory

. . . 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.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (2014). “Rape: A Love Story”, p.89, Atlantic Books Ltd

Topics: Powerful, Confused, Heart, Willful Ignorance

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.

source: - "Writer Joyce Carol Oates". "The Tavis Smiley show" with Tavis Smiley, www.pbs.org. May 8, 2013.

Topics: People, Voting, Needs, Disenfranchised, Brainwashed

For politics is in its essence as Adams had said, the 'systematic organization of hatred': either you were organized or you were not.

Topics: Essence, Organization, Hatred

I believe that any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression. ... Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it. The more original and unsettling their art, the more devastating the punishment.

Topics: Art, Believe, Punishment, Transgression

I used to think getting old was about vanity but actually it's about losing people you love.

source: - 1989 In The Guardian,18 Aug.

Topics: Thinking, Wrinkles, Vanity

What is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must have labor to invent History. Being faithful to all that happens to you of significance, recording days, dates, events, names, sights not relying merely upon memory which fades like a Polaroid print where you see the memory fading before your eyes like time itself retreating.

Topics: Memories, Eye, Sight, Polaroids

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.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Milazzo (1989). “Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates”, p.67, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Topics: Intelligent, Class, Details

If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.

Topics: Writing, Scientist, Metaphorical

On the elusive gift of blending austerity of craft with elasticity of allure.

Topics: Writing, Crafts, Austerity, Allure, Elasticity

Acting is the loneliest profession I know.

Topics: Acting, Profession, Knows

I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hardworking.

source: - "America's Foremost Woman of Letters". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 3, 2006.

Topics: Hard Work, School, College

Boxing is rough. Even if you win, you get hurt.

Topics: Sports, Hurt, Winning

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.

Topics: Sex, Animal, Men, Don't Leave Me, Electric Current

And I’m drawn to failure. I often write about it, and I’m sympathetic with it, I think, because I feel I’m contending with it constantly in my own life.

source: - "America's Foremost Woman of Letters". The Academy of Achievement Interview, www.achievement.org. June 03, 2006.

Topics: Feels, Contending, My Own

After love a formal feeling comes.

Topics: Feelings, Formal

... such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (2006). “Missing Mom”

Topics: White, Hot, Sun

Fame's carapace does not allow for easy breathing.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (1989). “(Woman) writer: occasions and opportunities”, Plume

Topics: Breathing, Doe, Fame

Not even the most devastating truth can be told; it must be evoked.

Topics: Truth

You can't deny Eros. Eros wills trike, like lightning. Our human defenses are frail, ludicrous. Like plasterboard houses in a hurricane. Your triumph is in perfect submission. And the god of Eros will flow through you, as Lawrence says, in the 'perfect obliteration of blood consciousness.

Topics: Blood, Perfect, House, Eros

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.

Topics: Writing, Self, Imagination, Amorality, Analogue

Like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (1973). “Do with Me You Will”

Topics: Truth, People, Speak

God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.

Topics: Blessing, Wrath, Distinguished

...[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.

Topics: People, Facts, Consciousness, Staggering

When a marriage ends, who is left to understand it?

Topics: Ends, Left

None of the rest of my life figures here.

Topics: Figures

Any writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject you will write.

Topics: Writing, Goal, Wasting Time

One of life's minor satisfactions is forgetting.

Topics: Satisfaction, Forget, Minors

When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly–why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing.

Topics: Real, Stupid, Silly

The mysteries of the female sex! We men can never hope to fathom your depths, but only try not to drown in them.

Topics: Sex, Men, Trying

I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.

source: - "Off the Page: Joyce Carol Oates". The WashingtonPost Interview, www.washingtonpost.com. October 24, 2003.

Topics: Morning, Writing, Consistency, Revising

My nature is orderly and observant and scrupulous and deeply introverted.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Milazzo (1989). “Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates”, p.68, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Topics: Character, Introverted, Observant

Whoever was stupid was beneath worry or thought; you did not have to figure them out. This eliminated hundreds of people. In this life you had time only for a certain amount of thinking, and there was no need to waste any of it on people who were not threatening.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “A Garden of Earthly Delights”, p.347, Modern Library

Topics: Stupid, Thinking, People

Nothing comes of so many things, if you have patience.

Topics: Having Patience, Ifs

People have libraries at home, they have bookshelves, they have CDs. And they sort of try, people try to bring great artists into their lives, into their physical houses and sort of live with portions of them. But they're not really deeply engaging with them.

source: - "Oates Details Writers' Last Days in 'Wild Nights'". Interview with Liane Hansen, www.npr.org. April 27, 2008.

Topics: Home, Artist, Cds

My writing is often a way of 'bearing witness' for others who lack the education and the opportunity to tell their own stories, so I hope that my writing won't be affected too much by my personal life.

Topics: Writing, Opportunity, Stories, Bearing Witness

For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.

Topics: Hurt, Rage, Prelude

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.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates, Lee Milazzo (1989). “Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates”, p.64, Univ. Press of Mississippi

Topics: Book, Butterfly, Rhinos

I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.

source: - "Off the Page: Joyce Carol Oates". The WashingtonPost Interview, www.washingtonpost.com. October 24, 2003.

Topics: Writing, Age, Twenties

Not to be alone. To be spared the possibility of knowing oneself, in aloneness.

Topics: Knowing, Possibility, Knowing Oneself

Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “Expensive People”, p.151, Modern Library

Topics: Confusing, Artistic

When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.

Topics: Mother, Morning, Brother

To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.

source: - "A Reader’s Guide to the Recent Novels of Joyce Carol Oates". Interview, celestialtimepiece.com.

Topics: Character, Personality, True Life

You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates @JoyceCarolOates, twitter.com. July 18, 2013.

Topics: Writing, Lucky, Ifs, Lucky You

You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.

Topics: Encouragement, Writing, Energy

There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it's gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.

source: - "Off the Page: Joyce Carol Oates". The WashingtonPost Interview, www.washingtonpost.com. October 24, 2003.

Topics: Art, Character, May

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.

source: - CNN's Book Chat, www.cnn.com.

Topics: Classic, Select, David Thoreau

Love is an indescribable sensation - perhaps a conviction, a sense of certitude.

source: - "Q&A: Joyce Carol Oates". Interview with Rosanna Greenstreet, www.theguardian.com. January 8, 2010.

Topics: Love Is, Conviction, Indescribable, Certitude

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.

source: - "Author Joyce Carol Oates on Widowhood’s ‘World of Absurdity’". Interview with Jeffrey Brown, www.pbs.org. February 3, 2011.

Topics: People, Fiction, Done, Universality

Why should I want what's good for me?' Beatrice asked him, smiling. 'Is that what you want for yourself - only what's good for you?

source: - Joyce Carol Oates (1979). “Night-Side”, Fawcett Books

Topics: Want, Should, What You Want

Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.

Topics: Reading, Writing, Trying

Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?

Topics: Real, Flames, Burning

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.

Topics: Writing, World, Violence, Disingenuous

A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.

Topics: Men, Self, Tennis, Tennis Courts

There is the expectation that a younger generation has the opportunity to redeem the crimes and failings of their elders and would have the strength and idealism to do so.

source: - Joyce Carol Oates' address to graduating class at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, May 28, 2006.

Topics: Opportunity, Expectations, Generations

I don't think I'm morbid by nature. Serious writers have always written about serious subjects. Lighthearted material doesn't appeal to me, and I don't read it. I think I'm a realist, with a realistic sensibility of history and the tragedy of history.

Topics: Thinking, Tragedy, Serious Subjects

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.

Topics: Husband, Writing, Thinking, Terrible Times