Famous Quotes & Sayings

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 100 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Joyce Carol Oates.

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Famous Quotes By Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 2099041

I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1731635

Acting is the loneliest profession I know. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 95021

I was nineteen years five months old when I fell in love for the first time. This seemed to me a profound, advanced age; never can we anticipate being older than we are, or wiser; if we're exhausted, it's impossible to anticipate being strong; as, in the grip of a dream, we rarely understand that we're dreaming, and will escape by the simplest of methods, opening our eyes. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 880249

Only in love is there trust - even the possibility of trust. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1391060

For the wanting to be good,in defiance of justice, is one of mankind's greatest weaknesses. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1513535

You could be thoroughly an intellectual while not surrendering maleness; you could not be so totally intellectual and not surrender some degree of femaleness. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 168109

My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 2110937

I've never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision; a complex of emotions; raw experience. The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 2035342

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

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 239046

Art is a means of memorialization of the past, a record of a rapidly vanishing world; a means of exorcising, at least temporarily, the ravages of homesickness. To speak of 'what is past, or passing or to come'-in the most meticulous language thereby to assure its permanence; to honor those we've loved and learned from and must outlive. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 516975

In this way unwittingly the Widow-to-Be is assuring her husband's death - his doom. Even as she believes she is behaving intelligently - "shrewdly" and "reasonably" - she is taking him to a teeming petri dish of lethal bacteria where within a week he will succumb to a virulent staph infection - a "hospital" infection acquired in the course of his treatment for pneumonia. Even as she is fantasizing that he will be home for dinner she is assuring that he will never return home. How unwitting, all Widows-to-Be who imagine that they are doing the right thing, in innocence and ignorance! — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1618486

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

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 610289

Since thirteen, she'd been preparing. She wasn't beautiful like these Bayhead Harbor girls, but it was surprising how men sometimes looked at her. More it was older men rather than guys her age, for some reason. [ ... ] There were guys - older guys - she'd yearned for so frankly you could see it in her face. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 474412

And what is 'art'? - a firestorm rushing through Time, arising from no visible source and conforming to no principles of logic or causality. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1426514

I can't imagine a mental life, a spiritual existence, not inextricably bound up with language of a formal, mediated nature. Telling stories, choosing an appropriate language with which to tell the story: This seems to me quintessentially human, one of the great adventures of our species. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 784229

Especially she dreaded the isolation of the swimmer, amid propelled and splashing figures yet she was isolated, always one isolated in the water where thoughts await like froth on the surface of the water that smelled like chemicals. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 652793

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

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 93064

I would know of myself through the witnessing and naming of others. As Jesus in the Gospels is only seen and spoken of and recorded by others. I would know my existence and the value of that existence through others' eyes, which I believed I could trust as I could not trust my own. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1508754

It is very hard to prevail where you are not, in the deepest and most intimate and forgiving of ways, loved. It is very hard to prevail in any case but without this love, it is close to impossible. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 387545

In that way you recall, suddenly, sharply, in daylight, a trace of a dream of the previous night
but even as you recall it, it begins to fade. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 2017622

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

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 190022

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. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 736290

Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 312998

Her long periods of intense concentration began to be punctuated by bouts of directionless daydreaming, sudden explosions of feeling. At such times Shakespeare was too dangerous to be read closely - Hamlet whispered truths too cruel to be borne, every word in Lear hooked in flesh and could not be dislodged. As for Wilde, Hobbes, Schopenhauer . . . even cynicism, Marya saw, can't save you. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 457717

After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1601524

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

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1616439

It must happen to everyone. The last time you make love, you can't know it will be the last. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1587802

Henry James's later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it's transcribed into written prose. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1582045

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

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1233014

Dear girl! Life is addictive. Yet we must live. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1624247

For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1565848

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

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Gossip - invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate the truth. — Joyce Carol Oates

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

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I was brought up to be sympathetic toward others. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1306206

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

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The appeal of writing is primarily the investigation of mystery. — Joyce Carol Oates

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

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1818123

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

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 90345

Yes, I've listened to just a few audiobooks - but hope to listen to more. I've wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening, and not reading, quite fascinating. — Joyce Carol Oates

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Everything is entirely in Nature, and Nature is entire in everything. She has her center in every brute. - SCHOPENHAUER The — Joyce Carol Oates

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Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it. — Joyce Carol Oates

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On their own, your eyes did not naturally discover the sky. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 2055547

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

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 2015997

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

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1854010

She was one who wished to believe the human motives precede actions for she was (she had always been) a rational individual yet clearly there were times (was this one of those times?) when actions might precede motives and even render them useless. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1845962

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

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1840249

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

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1667457

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

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1787750

Perhaps the inevitable tragedy of our complex civilization is that we must be specialists in our fields - and our fields have become increasingly difficult, so that communication is nearly impossible. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1776864

Just as our historical beginnings are utterly mysterious-why are we born? why when and as we are?-so too are the beginnings of works of art and of artists. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1770190

My governing principle as a critic is to call attention solely to books and writers that merit such attention, and to avoid whenever possible reviewing books "negatively" except in those instances in which the "negative" is countered by an admiring consideration of earlier books by the same author. — Joyce Carol Oates

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Better to be despised, then, than to be ignored; or damned with condescending praise. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1745689

And remember: you must not overwork your body, or your soul. You must not enslave yourself, as you would not enslave any other person. You must be the custodian of your self. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1738719

Time is the enemy of lovers. Worse even than the frank light of day. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1732500

The fact was that the woman lived the life she chose, she was happy in that life and it was no one's business after all but her own, my uncle's face darkening with blood as he spoke, my mother's fair fine skin pink as if smarting yet still I persisted, for I thought it such a horror, such a grief, yes and an embarrassment too, I said, "She's made a prison of this house, it's like she's a nun, it must be to punish herself," and my mother said quietly, angrily, "You don't know - what do you know! People do what they want to do. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1705391

We are all regionalists in our origins, however 'universal' our themes and characters, and without our cherished hometowns and childhood landscapes to nourish us, we would be like plants set in shallow soil. Our souls must take root - almost literally. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1695559

This determination to manage - to cope - to do as much unassisted as possible - is the Widow's prerogative. You might argue that it's a sign of her wish to appear to be - which is not the same as being - self-sufficient; or you might argue that it is a symptom of her derangement. But then, in the early minutes/hours/days of Widowhood - what is not, if examined closely, a symptom of derangement? — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 234248

But you are a solace just by existing, vividly in my thoughts if not here before me. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 591580

Dust jackets are always something of an enigma to me. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 563693

People who are disenfranchised politically and people who are poor often don't vote. They often don't elect politicians, so the politicians who are supporting them are really being very charitable, because they're not going to give them billions of dollars in campaign funds. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 555860

To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 509792

Much of the time he lay part-dressed on his bed, sipping gin, and thinking, and thinking, - though what it was, of which he thought, he seemed not to know. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 426014

Playdate. (n) A Date arranged by adults in which young children are brought together, usually at the home of one of them, for the premeditated purpose of "playing". A feature of contemporary American upscale suburban life in which "neighborhoods" have ceased to exist, and children no longer trail in and out of "neighbor childrens" houses or play in "backyards". In the absence of sidewalks in newer "gated" coummunities, children cannot "walk" to playdates but must be driven by adults, usually mothers. A "playdate" is never initiated by the players (i.e., children), but only by their mothers.
In American-suburban social climbing through playdating, this is the chapter you've been awaiting. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 418536

He was eight years older than I was, most of the calendar year. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 323756

Yes, 'Black Girl/White Girl' might be described as a 'coming-of-age' novel, at least for the survivor Genna. It is also intended as a comment on race relations in America more generally: we are 'roommates' with one another, but how well do we know one another? — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 280889

I don't know what marriages are like in general, but there are many things which I don't talk about with my husband. We discuss practical problems, but I wouldn't sit down with him and talk about the distant past. It's somewhat in contrast to other Americans, who feel that they have to confess things, but I'm really not like that. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 272956

You don't understand! Gilbert turned his back on me, but he wouldn't have turned his back on God." Ariah — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 251270

As if whoever it was held that camera was her closest friend. Or maybe it was the camera that was her closest friend. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 618827

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

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 216295

I do what I want to do. It was a brash statement of(her)girlhood. Now she was an adult, the boast seemed quaint. For rarely do you know what you want. Even after you've done it you can't say clearly if that was what you'd wanted or just something that happened to you, like weather. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 183166

The secret of being a writer: not to expect others to value what you've done as you value it. Not to expect anyone else to perceive in it the emotions you have invested in it. Once this is understood, all will be well. — Joyce Carol Oates

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Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 168009

I am snatching at things to prove my life. — Joyce Carol Oates

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

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 116420

Corset,' Mrs. Erskine? I don't understand." Because she was trussed up in one herself, she couldn't comprehend how Ariah had escaped hers. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 107024

Where there must be a choice, a girl will choose Daddy. Even if you are Mommy, you concede that this must be so: you remember when you were a girl, too. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 105356

The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 96401

I think we are all cats with nine lives, or even more. We must rejoice in our elusive catness. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 911577

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

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1179051

In the subway the trains move so swiftly you can never catch your breath. Outside the grimy window that's a reflecting surface like a mirror mostly there are the rushing tunnel walls, that slow as the train slows for a station, and the doors open with a pneumatic hiss like the sigh of a great ugly beast, and passengers lurch off, and new passengers lurch on, and I lift my eyes hopeful and yearning Who will be my destiny? Which one of you? — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1097994

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

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1093861

To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child, the whole tradition is lost. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1089763

( ... ) 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

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1086158

I'm nobody's daughter now. I'm through with that. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1031346

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

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1009575

Stalwart Zeno seemed oblivious, that faith in his daughter being alive after more than forty days did not compute with faith that Brett Kincaid would soon be arrested for a crime involving his daughter. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 996701

I always instruct my students to write a great deal. Write a journal. Take notes. Write when you are feeling wretched, when your mind is about to break down ... who knows what will float up to the surface? I am an unashamed believer in the magical powers of dreams; dreams enhance us. Even nightmares may be marketable
there is something to be said for the conscious, calculating exorcism of nightmares, if they give to us such works as those of Dostoyevsky, Celine,and Kafka. So the most important thing is to write, and to write nearly every day, in sickness and in health. In a while, in a few weeks or a few years, you can always make sense of that jumble of impressions ... or perhaps it will suddenly reveal its sense to you. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 970419

A writer's life is in his work, and that is the place to find him. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 927621

didn't thank
didn't wave goodbye
didn't flutter the air with kisses
a mound of gifts unwrapped
bed unmade
no appetite

always elsewhere

though it was raining elsewhere
though strangers peopled the streets
though we at home slaved and
baked and wept and
hung ornaments
and perfumed the dark
did he marvel
did he thank

was he grateful did he know
was he human
was he there

always elsewhere:
didn't thank
didn't kiss
toothbrush stiffened with unuse
puppy whining in the hall
car battery dead
sweaters unraveled

was that human?

Went where? — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 1203379

For the first time driving that day I could feel the motion of the Earth. The Earth rushing through the emptiness of space. Spinning on its axis but they say you don't feel it, you can't experience it. But to feel it is to be scared and happy at once and to know that nothing matters but that you do what you want to do and what you do you are. And I knew I was moving into the future. There is not PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or ever to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 880839

To be entranced, to be driven, to be obsessed, to be under the spell of an emerging, not quite fully 'comprehended' narrative
this is the greatest happiness of the writer's life even as it burns us out and exhausts us, unfitting us for the placid contours of 'normality. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 849989

Unyielding - Oh Norma Jeane leads a crazy life, you see - she has a former husband very jealous of her - he is her "ex" but he is — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 841524

She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 824507

Maybe he'd been mistaken, trying so hard to make his wife and young children happy. Maybe it's always a mistake, trying to assure the happiness of others. — Joyce Carol Oates

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[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness. — Joyce Carol Oates

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My writing is full of lives I might have led. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 749079

I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 685922

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

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes 678243

The standards for horror fiction should be no less than those for 'serious literary' fiction in which originality of concept, depth of characters, and attentiveness to language are vitally important. — Joyce Carol Oates