Oates Quotes & Sayings

Writing is the most solitary of arts. — Joyce Carol Oates

It is utterly naive, futile, uninformed - to think that our species is exceptional. So designated to master the beasts of the Earth, as in the Book of Genesis! — Joyce Carol Oates

A female is essentially a cunt, the pure purpose of the female is cunt, but a woman, a wife, is a cunt with a mouth, a man has to reckon with. It's a sobering fact: you start off with a cunt, you wind up with mouth. You wind up with your widow-to-be. — Joyce Carol Oates

These are open secrets, so to speak. Of the kind we dare not articulate, for fear of wounding those close to us. — Joyce Carol Oates

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

Foolish woman, don't despair. My justice is My mercy. 5 — Joyce Carol Oates

What had they been talking about? — Joyce Carol Oates

Probably nothing serious or worthwhile can be accomplished without one's willingness to be alone for sustained periods of time, which is not to say that one must live alone, obsessively. — Joyce Carol Oates

Art is the highest expression of the human spirit. — Joyce Carol Oates

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

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

'Maneater' is about N.Y.C. in the '80s. It's about greed, avarice, and spoiled riches. — John Oates

You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes. — 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

Our lives can only be interpreted in retrospect, yet must be lived from day to day, blindly. What folly, the human condition! — Joyce Carol Oates

Your punishment if you're a woman. Not loved enough. — Joyce Carol Oates

The key, I think, from a business point of view, is to learn how to be efficient in making a record that's not too expensive, so that you're not going crazy spending tons of money making a product that might not ever return that money. — John Oates

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

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

The historical Woodrow Wilson suffered from numerous complaints which we might today label as psychosomatic. Yet, Wilson did have a stroke as a relatively young man of 39 and seemed always to be ill. He was 'high-strung' - intensely neurotic - yet a charismatic personality nonetheless. — Joyce Carol Oates

Baseball, football, basketball - these quintessentially American pastimes are recognizably sports because they involve play: they are games. One plays football, one doesn't play boxing ... The boxing match is the very image, the more terrifying for being so stylized, of mankind's collective aggression; its ongoing historical madness. — Joyce Carol Oates

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

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

It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised. — Joyce Carol Oates

Not even the most devastating truth can be told; it must be evoked. — Joyce Carol Oates

Its somewhat austere and even forbidding limestone exterior, — Joyce Carol Oates

I work very slowly. It's like building a ladder, where you're building your own ladder rung by rung, and you're climbing the ladder. It's not the best way to build a ladder, but I don't know any other way. — Joyce Carol Oates

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

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

Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out? — Joyce Carol Oates

I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it. — Joyce Carol Oates

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

Jammed together at lunch. Not a drinker, nevertheless I experience a distinct alteration of consciousness in the presence of others - socially, but even in the classroom or seminar - a heightening, livening, intensifying sensation - a kind of euphoria. (Would the drinkers attain the same heights, without drinking? But they never make the experiment.) The process is deceptive: one feels oneself fulfilled, with these shreds and bits of other people, but at the same time one is being drained. — Joyce Carol Oates

I'm a big Hall and Oates fan. — Nate Parker

I'm really in such a fortunate position to have that foundation with Hall and Oates that lets me do whatever I want. That's the dream of a lot of creative people, and I don't take it for granted. I try to make the most of it. — John Oates

The best revenge is living well without you. — Joyce Carol Oates

There is a terrible weight in all kinds of beauty — Joyce Carol Oates

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. — Joyce Carol Oates

The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It's technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day
a way of relating. — Joyce Carol Oates

Hall & Oates is one of the few musical groups as satisfying now as it was back then. There's something incredibly musically satisfying about their songs. Nothing has diminished my love for them. — Ben Gibbard

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

Death is just the last scene of the last act. — Joyce Carol Oates

Vividly imagined, beautifully written, at times almost unbearably suspenseful-the stories in Kristiana Kahakauwila's debut collection, This Is Paradise, are boldly inventive in their exploration of the tenuous nature of human relations. These are poignant stories of 'paradise'-Hawai'i-with all that 'paradise' entails of the transience of sensuous beauty. — Joyce Carol Oates

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

When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame decided to open up the voting beyond their inner circle, to the actual fans, that's when I think everything changed. — John Oates

I'm bad at math. — John Oates

Like a turnip such a head could be blown away very easily. For where a man was weak, a woman has unmanned him. It would be a mercy to blow such a man away. — Joyce Carol Oates

From Mother you will inherit the belief that you can journey to your fate, there's a place to be located on a map that's destiny. If only you can get there. If it isn't too late. If no one stops you. — Joyce Carol Oates

Princeton is quite integrated. Women are professors at Princeton. Women are students at Princeton. That began in the 1970s. — Joyce Carol Oates

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? — Joyce Carol Oates

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

A diverse and lively collection, the highest art of the interview. — Joyce Carol Oates

That glass sliver in the heart. Amid a fluttery-delicious Benzedrine rush, virtually every remark made to you is freighted with destiny, a sweet-painful stab in the heart. And Benzedrine and champagne, what a combination! The Blond Actress was only just discovering what everybody else in Hollywood knew. — Joyce Carol Oates

That autumn, I kept coming back to Hopper's images, drawn to them as if they were blueprints and I was a prisoner; as if they contained some vital clue about my state. Though I went with my eyes over dozens of rooms, I always returned to the same place: to the New York diner of Nighthawks, a painting that Joyce Carol Oates once described as "our most poignant, ceaselessly replicated romantic image of American loneliness" ...
Green shadows were falling in spikes and diamonds on the sidewalk. There is no colour in existence that so powerfully communicates urban alienation, the atomisation of human beings inside the edifices they create, as this noxious pallid green, which only came into being with the advent of electricity, and which is inextricably associated with the nocturnal city, the city of glass towers, of empty illuminated offices and neon signs. — Olivia Laing

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

I have a great family, I live an amazing life. — John Oates

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. — Joyce Carol Oates

I have such a wide variety of tastes in things that I like musically. — John Oates

Civilization is faces, "appearances": when these collapse, civilization collapses as well. — Joyce Carol Oates

When there is no longer any point in lying, no one will lie — Joyce Carol Oates

I compose most of my tweets with care, as if they were aphorisms - they are not usually dashed-off. Sometimes I'm surprised by the high, poetic quality of Twitter - it lends itself to a surreal sort of self-expression. — Joyce Carol Oates

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

My guitar playing is a synthesis of traditional American acoustic style and Urban Pop and R&B. — John Oates

To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them. — Joyce Carol Oates

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

My grandmother could never have written a memoir, so 'The Gravedigger's Daughter' is a homage to her life, and to the lives of other young women of her generation, which are so rarely articulated. — Joyce Carol Oates

I learned you don't discover the evidence of any cause in its result. — Joyce Carol Oates

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

Picture in your mind a sense of personal destiny. — Wayne Oates

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

Deep down under where his heart resided, strangled up in thorny vines of guilt, anger, fear and longing, there lay something deeper in him, something that he couldn't see but she could. — Carol Oates

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

Storytelling is shaped by two contrary, yet complementary, impulses - one toward brevity, compactness, artful omission; the other toward expansion, amplification, enrichment. — Joyce Carol Oates

I didn't make a solo album until the year 2000. — John Oates

Because I am in love. Love is a slow bleed. — Joyce Carol Oates

Ambitious, absorbing, and poignantly moving. — Joyce Carol Oates

Art serves a purpose. It expands our horizons, frees our minds, and opens us up to new experiences. It opens the imagination. All these great discoveries of our time - without the desire to reach beyond our boundaries, we would be forever stagnant. The folly is in closing one's eyes and not recognizing it. — Carol Oates

My mustache has become this weird iconic representation of a certain era. — John Oates

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

Society is the picnic certain individuals leave early, the party they fail to enjoy, the musical comedy they find not worth the price of admission. — Joyce Carol Oates

Love is just like the flower; it has hidden depths that we rarely ever explore. Beneath the surface lies a network of roots. You can admire the flower for what it is, or you can dig deeper. The more you dig, the more you will find. The real reasons we love a person sometimes exist in the darkest and deepest part of us, the part that knows no logic ... or rationale. — Carol Oates

Lawrence is the supreme poet of Eros. No recriminations, no reproaches, no guilt, no 'morality'. For what's 'morality' but a leash around the neck? A noose? What's 'morality' but what other people want you to do, for their own, selfish, unstated purposes? — Joyce Carol Oates

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

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. — Joyce Carol Oates

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

My self is all to me. I don't have any need of you. — Joyce Carol Oates

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

For The Accursed is intended as a work of inquiring moral complexity, and not a "sensationalist" rehashing of an old, dread scandal far better left to molder in the grave! — Joyce Carol Oates

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

While there are 'women writers' there are not, and have never been, 'men writers.' This is an empty category, a class without specimens; for the noun 'writer' - the very verb 'writing' - always implies masculinity. — Joyce Carol Oates

I couldn't begin to name names ... in general I have found racers to be some of the most competitive people on the planet ... and some of the nicest as well. — John 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

All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later. — Joyce Carol Oates

How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into elastic patterns called "sentences." And these sentences into paragraphs, and beyond. — Joyce Carol Oates

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

Running! If there is any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I cannot think of what it might be. — Joyce Carol Oates