Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

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

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

I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I ...

These are open secrets, so to speak. Of the kind we dare not articulate, for fear of wounding those ...

As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time...

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

My theory is that literature is essential to society in the way that dreams are essential to our liv...

A wet autumn morning, a garbage truck clattering down the street. The first snowfall of the season, ...

A daydreamer is prepared for most things.

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

You never give such relationships a thought, To give a thought, to take a thought is a function of d...

To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next st...

Boxing has become America's tragic theater.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and ...

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

Only where there is life can there be home.

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

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

Boxing has become America's tragic theater.

The worst cynicism a belief in luck.

As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my 'farm chores' - but I had time also to be alon...

It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determi...

When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates ...

For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amor...

Warum man schreibt, ist eine Frage die sich der Schriftsteller, völlig versunken in seine Arbeit, ni...

. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attrac...

When you're fifty you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think...

I should say, one of the things about being a widow or a widower, you really, really need a sense of...

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

Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I c...

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

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

Among many of my friends and acquaintances, I seem to be one of the very few individuals who felt or...

Unbidden, Unwelcome, Yet unable to resist, I entered a stranger's life

For in America this season is decreed “family season”. (Eat your hearts out, you pitiable loners who...

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.

I haven't any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes the w...

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

...we so resented that asshole up there talking talking talking taking up the entire assembly expect...

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as th...

I feel very transparent in myself. I’m more of an observer. I’m interested in what’s going on. I’m n...

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequ...

I'm drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams....

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, d...

Only when men are connected to large universal goals are they really happy-and one result of their ...

Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do thi...

We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by wo...

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

Be daring, take on anything. Don’t labor over little cameo works in which every word is to be perfec...

The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is trem...

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to writ...

Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really experience a text until you've taught it, in loving d...

The theme of invisibility has haunted me for many years, since earliest girlhood. A woman often feel...

When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the desp...

Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.

You people who have survived childhood don't remeber any longer what it was like. You think children...

This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable b...

I was brought up to be sympathetic toward others.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, an...

In love there are two things - bodies and words.

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

I think it's very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to b...

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

We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves unable to see that here now this very moment is sa...

Primarily, 'Black Girl/White Girl' is the story of two very different, yet somehow 'fated' girls; fo...

In love there are two things - bodies and words.

How exhausted I am suddenly!—though this has been Ray’s best day in the hospital so far, and we are ...

Hospital vigils inspire us to such nostalgia. Hospital vigils take place in slow-time during which t...

I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. ~ I believe that we yearn to trans...

There’s a German term- heimweh, homesickness. It’s a powerful sensation, like a narcotic. A yearning...

The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children’s books aloud to enraptured chil...

Nor do I like being told upsetting news—unless there is a good reason. I can’t help but feel that th...

That I was sleeping at a time when my husband was dying is so horrible a thought, I can’t confront i...

The minutiae of our lives! Telephone calls, errands, appointments. None of these is of the slightest...

In this way unwittingly the Widow-to-Be is assuring her husband’s death—his doom. Even as she believ...

Still, I am angry with him. I am very angry with him. With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am fu...

The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon ...

For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of lone...

It may be that actual tears have stained the tile floors or soaked into the carpets of such places. ...

It is utterly naive, futile, uninformed—to think that our species is exceptional. So designated to m...

It is the most horrific thought—my husband died among strangers.

The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out ...

There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis...

I am made to think, not for the first time, that in my writing I have plunged ahead-head-on, heedles...

How strange it is, to be walking away. Is it possible that I am really going to leave Ray—here? Is i...

Loving our parents, we bring them into us. They inhabit us. For a long time I believed that I could ...

She will speculate that she didn’t fully know her husband—this will give her leverage to seek him, t...

Like editing, gardening requires infinite patience; it requires an essential selflessness, and optim...

Nowhere in a hospital can you walk without blundering into the memory pools of strangers—their dread...

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not ...

The days were brief and attenuated and the season appeared to be fixed - neither summer nor winter, ...

Dorcas wasn't a fast walker. It was difficult for me to keep behind her. I tried to let others, jogg...

The distinction between "assistant" and intern" is a simple one: assistants are paid, interns are no...

Dominique (who, like other Catamount girls, had a cache of pills for every occasion) offered me a be...

This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just...

Lawrence is the supreme poet of Eros. No recriminations, no reproaches, no guilt, no 'morality'. For...

Death is just the last scene of the last act.

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

I know that there are many essential biological differences between the sexes, of course. But not so...

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

I have no inner life. I have no ‘intimate’ life. I am just what I-what to do. I move from one habita...