Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

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

~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

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

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

. . . 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.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?

~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

~ Joyce Carol Oates

A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?

~ Joyce Carol Oates

Death is just the last scene of the last act.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

~ 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

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.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

~ Joyce Carol Oates

It isn't the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

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

~ Joyce Carol Oates

But he doesn't love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love--the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn't happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one another's faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn't happen.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

~ Joyce Carol Oates

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.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

~ Joyce Carol Oates

Legs was always proud even before FOXFIRE, that’s the primary fact about Legs Sadovsky: pride.

~ 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

The distinction between assistant and intern is a simple one: assistants are paid, interns are not.But of course interns are paid, in experience.

~ 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

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.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

Dominique (who, like other Catamount girls, had a cache of pills for every occasion) offered me a bennie- Benzedrine?- to elevate my spirits. Adamantly I told her, No thanks! I wanted to face what's called reality with my eyes open.I've made that a principle for my life. Sometimes I wonder if this has been a wise decision.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.

~ 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

Popular! In America, what else matters?

~ Joyce Carol Oates

It had seemed to me an elegant nightmare concoction made by adults for adults, to further the aims and fantasies of adults, and what have children to do with such things?

~ Joyce Carol Oates

He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

There’s a German term- heimweh, homesickness. It’s a powerful sensation, like a narcotic. A yearning from home, but for something more- a past self, perhaps. A lost self. When I first saw you on the street, Katya, I felt such a sensation… I have no idea why

~ Joyce Carol Oates

The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children’s books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she’d been a little girl. There hadn’t been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

~ 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

Derailed. In exile. Deeply ashamed, despised. Yet she had so little pride, she was grateful most days simply to be alive.There is Minimalist art; there are minimalist lives.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

I know that there are many essential biological differences between the sexes, of course. But not so many ‘culturally-mandated’ differences. In First World countries we’ve evolved beyond mere biology -it isn’t the fate of the human female to be pregnant continously until she wears out and dies.

~ Joyce Carol Oates

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

~ Joyce Carol Oates