Joyce Carol Oates famous quotes

For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Memories #Choices #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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Interesting #Sometimes #Reviews

Great art is cathartic; it is always moral.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Art #Moral #Great Art

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Reading #Book #Mean

I never change, I simply become more myself.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Never Change

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

#Writing #Apology #Want

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Editors #Sympathetic #Critics

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Evil #Victim #Attractive

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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Writing #Soul #Cards

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

#Running #Thinking #Imagination

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Change #Time #Tunnels

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

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Wall #Writing #Space

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

#Humility #Passion #Forget

The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Life #Memorable #Unrequited Love

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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Gone #Sacred #Moments

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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Running #Thinking #Feet

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

#Loneliness #Realizing #Hungry

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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Suicide #Party #Grieving

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

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

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Encouragement #Party #Needs

Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Creativity #Men #Goal

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

#Dream #Writing #Thinking

Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Morning #Good Day #Writing

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

#Believe #Belief #Always Believe

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

#Mind #Technique #Reader

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

#Dirty #Noses #Firsts

The mere passage of time makes us all exiles.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#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?
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Eye #Loss #Color

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

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Giving Up #Artist

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

#Stars #Past #Light

A daydreamer is prepared for most things.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Prepared

Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Daughter #Mother #Children

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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Stupid #Real #Silly

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

#Feels

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Sight #Optics #Illusion

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

#Invisible #Advantage

Maybe, love is always forgiveness, to a degree.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Love Is #Degrees

Your punishment if you're a woman. Not loved enough.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Challenges #Moral #Idiot

Death is just the last scene of the last act.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Girl #Sides #Woods

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Art #Writing #Thinking

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

#Boxing #Religion #Celebration

In love there are two things - bodies and words.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Science #Law #Divinity

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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Mind #Rewards #Use

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#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.
-- Joyce Carol Oates

#Anxiety #Creative #Relaxation

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

#Night #Light #Desert