Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

There are people, primarily women!
who are what I call 'conduits of emotion.' In their company, the half dead can come alive. They need not be beautiful women or girls. It's a matter of blood warmth. The integrity of the spirit." He turned the page of his sketch pad and began anew, whistling thinly through his teeth.
"Thus an icy-cold soul, in the presence of one so blessed, can regain something of his lost self. Sometimes! ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

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. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Tragedy is the highest form of art. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

These were no-man's-lands, limbos of a sort, places where language did not prevail and the only protection was flight, if you could run fast enough; or submission if you couldn't. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Betrayal is the deepest wound. Betrayal is what remains of love, when love has gone. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Without anyone to talk to, a person is not quite real. Sounds are very important - we are like bats tapping at each other with sounds, making sure there is someone there, groping along. Sounds. Syllables. The beat of music. It is all a curious flowing, which you can hear only when you are silent yourself. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Great handfuls of her life were being stolen from her and she would never be able to retrieve them. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I could never take the idea of religion very seriously. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

( ... ) I could "talk fast"
that's to say, without hesitating, stammering
most of the time
but there were categories of words, sentiments, I could never say, they'd have stuck in my throat. The embarrassment of it even whispering-teasing to Legs for instance 'Yeah you're my heart too!' or 'I love you' or 'I would die for you', nobody ever talked that way, mostly there was just my mother and me and we hardly talked at all. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

What you call your personality, you know?
it's not like actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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 ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Like the philosophy credited to Jack Dempsey: The more punches a man takes, the closer he is to the end. Because a man has only a fixed number of punches he can take in his lifetime. Pa? ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Our house was made of stone, stucco, and clapboard; the newer wings, designed by a big-city architect, had a good deal of glass, and looked out into the Valley, where on good days we could see for many miles while on humid hazy days we could see barely beyond the fence that marked the edge of our property. Father, however, preferred the roof: In his white, light-woolen three-piece suit, white fedora cocked back on his head, for luck, he spent many of his waking hours on the highest peak of the highest roof of the house, observing, through binoculars, the amazing progress of construction in the Valley - for overnight, it seemed, there appeared roads, expressways, sewers, drainage pipes, "planned" communities with such names as Whispering Glades, Murmuring Oaks, Pheasant Run, Deer Willow, all of them walled to keep out intruders, and, yet more astonishing, towerlike buildings of aluminum and glass and steel and brick, buildings whose windows shone and winked like mirrors, splendid in sunshine like pillars of flame; such beauty where once there had been mere earth and sky, it caught at your throat like a great bird's talons, taking your breath away. 'The ways of beauty are as a honeycomb,' Father told us, and none of us could determine, staring at his slow moving lips, whether the truth he spoke was a happy truth or not, whether even it was truth. ("Family") ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I can't say I was a very successful sorority girl. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Why you can't trust women. Even young girls. Can't know what the fuck they are thinking, can't know what they are feeling, can't know how they will surprise you except to know it won't be a surprise you will like. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

The writer understands how deeply mysterious the 'familiar' really is. How strangely opaque, what we've seen a thousand times. And how inconsolable a loss, when the taken-for-granted is finally taken from us. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Early publication can be a dubious blessing: we all know writers who would give anything not to have published their first book, and go about trying to buy up all existing copies. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

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

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

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. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Let them write angry letters to the Government-
they haven't been loved enough, there has been some crime ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

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? ~ Joyce Carol Oates

And I like your laugh, Sabbath; it's inaudible. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

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

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. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Loretta folded her arms. She felt like a heroine in a movie, confronted by a jealous husband in a kitchen while outside the camera is aching to draw back and show a wonderland of adventures waiting for her - long, frantic rides on trains, landscapes of wounded soldiers, a lovely white desert across which a camel caravan draped voluptuously in veils moves slowly with a kind of mincing melancholy, the steamy jungles of India opening before British officers in white, young officers, the mysteries of English drawing-rooms cracking before the quick, humorless smirk of a wise young woman from America ... ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I have no inner life. I have no 'intimate' life. I am just what I-what to do. I move from one habitation to another like one of those-is it herit crabs? Taking up residence in others shells.
(…)
Others' shells are fine. You come, and then you go. They're gone ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

P.J. said, "That's true about any statement we make, isn't it? We never tell as much as we know."
"Right! So We're lying. So almost every statement is a lie, we can't help it."
"Yeah. But some statements are more lies than others. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

A lot of widows feel that they have betrayed their spouse by continuing to live. It's deranged thinking. I know that, but that doesn't stop you feeling it. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Every scar in my face is worth it. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

She was standing with her thin arms lifted in a pose of crucifixion as the white satin gown with its myriad pearl buttons, tucks and pleats and ingenious lace trim, was fitted onto her like an exquisite straitjacket. Mrs. Littrell had insisted upon the corset, Ariah could scarcely breathe. I take thee Gilbert. My lawfully wedded husband. A sneeze would have shattered the corset, and the wedding. At police headquarters, the bride of the "fallen" man was clearly to blame. Ariah ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Boxing has become America's tragic theater. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.' ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Yet the fact had no consciousness of itself except through me. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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? ~ Joyce Carol Oates

One man's insanity is another man's genius; someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

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

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

Like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth ... ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

Fame's carapace does not allow for easy breathing. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

Alone,alone! It is a fact, you hear more acutely and you see and think most acutely,when you are alone.
Alone, alone! But there is happiness in alone, if you believe you have chosen it. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Like most people, I can be very easily hurt. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

The hopeful young author had no doubt that books might change the world. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

There are boxers possessed of such remarkable intuition, such uncanny prescience, one would think they were somehow recalling their fights, not fighting them as we watch. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

But so like Hollywood people, who played at the emotions they truly felt. Or maybe the emotions they truly felt could only be expressed in play? ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I will be the clinician of my own pathology. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

It's rare that we actively and consciously 'forget'; most of the time we have simply forgotten, with no consciousness of having forgotten. In individuals, the phenomenon is called 'denial'; in entire cultures and nations, it's usually called 'history. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

The dilemma is, in the United States, each penniless citizen believes that, with luck, he might become a millionaire; and so doesn't want to put restraints on "robber barons"-he might become one one day! ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I live now for my work. I live for my work. I live only for my work. One day I will do work deserving of my talent & desire. One day. This I pledge. This I vow. I want you to love me for my work. But if you don't love me I can't continue my work. So please love me! - so I can continue my work. I am trapped here! I am trapped in this blond mannequin with the face. I can only breathe through that face! Those nostrils! That mouth! Help me to be perfect. If God was in us, we would be perfect. God is not in us, we know this for we are not perfect. I don't want money & fame. I want only to be perfect. The blond mannequin Monroe is me & is not me. She is not me. She is what I was born. Yes I want you to love her. So you will love me. Oh I want to love you! Where are you? I look, I look & there is no one there. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Evil' is after all a relative term: there being a minor and pragmatical sort, to be disposed of as one swats a fly, and a vast, all-encompassing, one might say universal sort, that must be halted by any means at hand. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

One writes to memorialize, and to bring to life again that which has been lost. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

If marriage is a masquerade, there is the very real danger that masks may slip. The ~ Joyce Carol Oates

One of life's minor satisfactions is forgetting. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

Truth must evolve' - how very convenient for liars. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Unbidden, Unwelcome, Yet unable to resist, I entered a stranger's life ~ Joyce Carol Oates

I could EAT YOUR HEART & asshole you'd never know it. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Evil isn't a cosmological riddle, only just selfish human behavior. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty? ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Did you know, Marianne: how by breaking the code that day, you broke it forever? For us all? ~ Joyce Carol Oates

It's fine, I have it. It's fine. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

The art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Because the Legs wasn't fearful of heights or swimming in rough water or Death itself she wasn't afraid to risk making a fool of herself. Maybe you think that's something of no consequence but it isn't - for making a fool of yourself, offering yourself to others to laugh at, to jeer, that takes guts. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Fear in her eyes that were a damp blurred blue Patrick would afterward recall, ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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? ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

Well, no. Marianne thought there could be lots worse. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

It was not yet known how the Revolution would develop. But Upton supposed that the arguments of the philosophical anarchists were most convincing: society would fragmentise into independent, self-governing communities of mutually congenial individuals, requiring no police, no army, no guardians of morality, and no government. The old Deity being dead and dethroned, Humankind would come at last into power. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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.) ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Before I undertake a lengthy project, I have usually given much thought to it over a period of years. My files are filled with likely subjects - which perhaps, one day, I will develop. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

For that was mom's trump card: she was the mother, and so possessed a mysterious and unquestioned authority. Dad was the boss, but Mom was the power. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance. ~ Joyce Carol Oates

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. ~ Joyce Carol Oates