Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

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

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.

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.

The person you love best, you share the world with. When that person's gone the world remains but it isn't the same thing, it's at a distance.

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

Lionel turned his thoughts eagerly inward, to discover that inward was perilous, too; his soul was a sort of curved reflective surface that distorts, as in a funhouse mirror, the face of one peering into it. You might be anyone, any face. The face is mere skin. Accident. He seemed at such times to be approaching a profound yet unspeakable truth: that our identities are accidents.

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.

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.

If I try to summon back his face, the sound of his voice, and the sensation in my stomach like a key turning in a lock when he touched me, I lose everything.

Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.

Being a grand-kid, you can so easily regress. All the ages you ever were are all recalled by the grandparent in a shimmery love-haze, like those blurred faces on tv, in which identities have been disguised.

I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.

To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box.

It had given him a charge of entitlement and invincibility he would draw upon through life, like a limitless bank account.)

While Annabel possessed the sylphid grace of a fairy-tale princess, unstudied and seemingly spontaneous, yet with a dreamy air, Willy presented a dramatic contrast: brash, brusque, heavy-jawed, with eyes that engaged too directly, and too often ironically. Willy's considerable charm was at first obscured, to the superficial eye, by a certain stolidity in her figure, as in her character.

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)

Her problem wasn't she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn't a blonde and she wasn't dumb.

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.

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

Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.

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.

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.

In our marriage it was our practice not to share anything that was upsetting, depressing, demoralizing, tedious - unless it was unavoidable. Because so much in a writer's life can be distressing - negative reviews, rejections by magazines, difficulties with editors, publishers, book designers - disappointment with one's own work, on a daily/hourly basis! - it seemed to me a very good idea to shield Ray from this side of my life as much as I could. For what is the purpose of sharing your misery with another person, except to make that person miserable, too?

Self-criticism is an art not many are qualified to practice.

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.

Why the need, rising in some very nearly to the level of compulsion, to verify experience by way of language?-to scrupulously record and preserve the very passing of Time?

As a child. I grew up on a small farm, so I did a lot of drawings of animals, chickens and people. At the bottom of every page, I'd put a strange scribble. I was emulating adult handwriting, though I didn't actually know how to write.

You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children are whole, uncomplicated creatures, and if you split them in two with a handy axe there would be all one substance inside, hard candy. But it isn't hard candy so much as a hopeless seething lava of all kinds of things, a turmoil, a mess. And once the child starts thinking about this mess he begins to disintegrate as a child and turns into something else
an adult, an animal.

My reputation for writing quickly and effortlessly notwithstanding, I am strongly in favor of intelligent, even fastidious revision, which is, or certainly should be, an art in itself.

Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.

Ohhhhh."

A lush-bodied girl in the prime of her physical beauty. In an ivory georgette-crepe sundress with a halter top that gathers her breasts up in soft undulating folds of the fabric. She's standing with bare legs apart on a New York subway grating. Her blond head is thrown rapturously back as an updraft lifts her full, flaring skirt, exposing white cotton panties. White cotton! The ivory-crepe sundress is floating and filmy as magic. The dress is magic. Without the dress the girl would be female meat, raw and exposed.

She's not thinking such a thought! Not her.

She's an American girl healthy and clean as a Band-Aid. She's never had a soiled or a sulky thought. She's never had a melancholy thought. She's never had a savage thought. She's never had a desperate thought. She's never had an un-American thought. In the papery-thin sundress she's a nurse with tender hands. A nurse with luscious mouth. Sturdy thighs, bountiful breasts, tiny folds of baby fat at her armpits. She's laughing and squealing like a four year-old as another updraft lifts her skirt. Dimpled knees, a dancer's strong legs. This husky healthy girl. The shoulders, arms, breasts belong to a fully mature woman but the face is a girl's face. Shivering in New York City mid-summer as subway steam lifts her skirt like a lover's quickened breath.

"Oh! Ohhhhh."

It's nighttime in Manhattan, Lexington Avenue at 51st Street. Yet the white-white lights exude the he

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To the young there are no degrees of old just as there are no degrees of dead - either you are, or you are not.

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

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.

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

Civilization is faces, "appearances": when these collapse, civilization collapses as well.

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.

Relief is happiness for those who, otherwise, would have no happiness.

Always, it was claimed of her, she was strong and she was capable. You are not loved for being strong and capable if you are a female but if you are a female and you are strong and capable you will make your way without love.

When I wrote 'We Were The Mulvaneys,' I was just old enough to look back upon my own family life and the lies of certain individuals close to me, with the detachment of time. I wanted to tell the truth about secrets: How much pain they give, yet how much relief, even happiness we may feel when at last the motive for secrecy has passed.

Legally I am a 'widow' - that is the box I must check. But beyond that - I am not sure that I ­exist.

I had been reading Wittgenstein. There are no philosophical problems, only linguistic misunderstandings. Was this so? If so, why write at such length about it? I could understand [his] attraction to such a philosophy. Spartan, rigorous. Surpassingly skeptical. Well, good: philosophers should be skeptical. (No one else is: the mass of mankind is credulous as a gigantic infant, willing to suck any teat.)

Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of humankind?

The challenge is, to live in a house from which meaning has departed, like air leaking from a balloon. A slow leak, yet lethal. And one day, the balloon is flat: it is not a balloon any longer. By

My students often say, 'My roommate read this story and really liked it,' and it's hard to convince them that there are things wrong with it. I say, 'Well, people who love you want you to be happy. But I'm your professor and I'm supposed to be teaching you something.'

Miles away, factory smokestacks rimmed with flame sent up cast billowing clouds of smoke that gave watercolor look to the sky – orange yellow – a pink cast like dawn – beauty to the gray-layered winter sky like cotton batting laced with flame bleak and radiant simultaneously; and Felix in a rush of gratitude though his heartbeat was still erratic and his hands were sticky with blood could have weepy seeing such beauty in all he'd been a witness to most of his life, thinking Oh Jesus he was going to miss these opaque surfaces of a world he knew so well, it was like his skill turned inside out, all he loved out there, he was missing them even now when he was still here, still alive.

but was this funny? was this funny? was this funny? why was this funny? why was Sugar Kane funny? why were men dressed as women funny? why were men made up as women funny? why were men staggering in high heels funny? why was Sugar Kane funny, was Sugar Kane the supreme female impersonator? was this funny? why was this funny? why is female funny? why were people going to laugh at Sugar Kane & fall in love with Sugar Kane? why, another time? why would Sugar Kane Kovalchick girl ukulelist be such a box office success in America? why dazzling-blond girl ukulelist alcoholic Sugar Kane Kovalchick a success? why Some Like It Hot a masterpiece? why Monroe's masterpiece? why Monroe's most commercial movie? why did they love her? why when her life was in shreds like clawed silk? why when her life was in pieces like smashed glass? why when her insides had bled out? why when her insides had been scooped out? why when she carried poison in her womb? why when her head was ringing with pain? her mouth stinging with red ants? why when everybody on the set of the film hated her? resented her? feared her? why when she was drowning before their eyes? I wanna be loved by you boop boopie do! why was Sugar Kane Kovalchick of Sweet Sue's Society Syncopaters so seductive? I wanna be kissed by nobody else but you I wanna! I wanna! I wanna be loved by you alone but why? why was Marilyn so funny? why did the world adore Marilyn? who despised herself? was that why? why did the world love Marilyn? wh

Dorcas wasn't a fast walker. It was difficult for me to keep behind her. I tried to let others, joggers, and bicyclists, come between us. I followed her past a field where girls were playing soccer, and into the woods bordering Catamount Creek. The smell of pine needles underfoot was sharp, pungent. I seemed to know that I would always associate that smell with this afternoon, and with Dorcas.

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.

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

In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolved

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

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.

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

If this was a flirtation - and it felt like a flirtation - it was like no other flirtation in Katya's experience: with a man old enough to be her grandfather?

Freaky kids like us can't ever be normal- Tyler says smugly- Our generation is some new kind of "evolutionary development", my shrink says- "Normal" is just "average", not cool. My latest diagnosis is "A.P.M", Acute Premature Melancholia", usually an affliction of late middle age, they think is genetic since Ty Senoir has had it all his life, too.
You look if you might be A.P.M, too, Sky: that kind of pissed-off mopey look in your face like you swallowed something really gross and can't spit it out.

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.

Every scar in my face is worth it.

one kept me informed on Dad's progress. Or lack of progress. Or how serious it all was - is. You certainly didn't, darling." Yet, was this true? Vaguely I seemed to know that my father was not doing well for some time. Driving on our country roads you see the carcasses of animals - raccoons, deer - lying at the roadside, killed

The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his efforts, he believes in the future.

Men grow cold as girls grow old
And we all lose our charms in the end.
How prettily Lorelei Lee sang these mordant lyrics!

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.

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.

The most common misperception about me is that I write fast. I just write often. Every hour that I can.

Later, her first intense, serious love affair, yes then she'd lost something more tangible, if undefinable: her heart? her independence? her control of, definition of, self? That first true loss, the furious bafflement of it. And never again quite so assured, confident.

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.

Mrs. Erskine struck him as fierce and plain and haughty as one of those straight-backed red-haired girl-women in certain of the watercolors of Winslow Homer.

A woman who has lost her husband is invalid, thus an invalid. In

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.

went out for sports as others did, in an affable herd.

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.

VERY ODD, HOWEVER, Annabel was beginning to feel, how the stranger continued to hold the hand-sickle, at his side; now he'd turned to her, seeing her, yet without an air of surprise, as if he'd known she was there, observing him; he smiled, in a rapt sort of silence, as no gentleman would ever do, in fact; as if he and Annabel Slade had met by chance in a public place, or in some dimension in which the sexes might "meet" impersonally, like animals, with no names, no families - no identities. In that instant, Annabel felt both chilled and flushed with warmth; and somewhat faint; and had to resist the impulse to hide her (burning) face in the little bouquet of flowers she had picked, that the bold stranger would not stare so directly upon her with his penetrating gaze. A

I really love to set things in places that are real to me.

Foolish woman, don't despair. My justice is My mercy. 5

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.

Unfamiliar places could be more dangerous than familiar places, unexpectedly. The boy had been discovering that an unfamiliar place was more easily "haunted" than a familiar place simply because there was less there to distract the memory.

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.

I write in longhand and assemble lots of notes, and then I try to collate them into a coherent chronology. It's like groping along in the dark. I like writing and find it challenging, but I don't find it easy.

Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.

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.

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

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

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

And the thought consoled me, as it does now: everything you believe you have imagined is real. You have only to outlive it.

Whatever you do, with whom you do it or whether you do it alone, and when, and how, and why, to what mysterious end - it's balanced against nothing, against Death and forgetting. You balanced against oblivion.

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.

[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.

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.

Who is to blame for this most recent of sports disgraces in America? The culture that flings young athletes like Tyson up out of obscurity, makes millionaires of them and watches them self-destruct?

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.

Burnaby wasn't a Christian but he behaved like a Christian is supposed to behave which made Colborne, a Christian, uncomfortable.

Yet the fact had no consciousness of itself except through me.

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.

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.

Then the noise faded and Legs squinted up at the sky, the moon so bright you'd never think it could be merely rock like the earth's common rock and lifeless, merely reflected light from an invisible sun and not a powerful living light of its own ...

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.

The place where you came from ain't there any more, and where you had in mind to go is cancelled out. This place you are now - inside your daddy's house - is nothing but a cardboard box I can knock down any time. You know that and always did know it. You hear me?

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

She had no existence, in herself. From earliest childhood she had believed this. Rather she was a reflecting surface, reflecting others' perception of her, and love of her.

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