Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

My nature is orderly and observant and scrupulous and deeply introverted.

The best revenge is living well without you.

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

Honorary degrees and lifetime achievement awards are very encouraging. I know that it might sound strange that a writer who has published many books still needs encouragement, but this is true.

Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.

Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms.

I would suggest the widow do things the husband used to do, so he seems to be there with you. You will feel like just going to bed. It's so wonderful, going to bed.

Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.

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.

The cleaning is something I use as a reward if I get some work done. I go into a very happy state of mind when I'm vacuuming.

Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.

Maybe, love is always forgiveness, to a degree.

Art is about freedom of expression, and should not be molded to fit any propaganda or lofty ideal.

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.

A daydreamer is prepared for most things.

Death is just the last scene of the last act.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

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

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

The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.

As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my 'farm chores' - but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.

Your punishment if you're a woman. Not loved enough.

There is something thrilling in the mimesis of life's surprising unfolding.

A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.

Our house is made of glass... and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.

One of the large consolations for experiencing anything unpleasant is the knowledge that one can communicate it.

For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.

The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.

In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolved

Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments; it stirs our capacity for dreaming.

Great art is cathartic; it is always moral.

I'm very American in the sense of being an explorer. America is filled with people who are interested in exploring landscapes, either external or internal. A westward nation of explorers.

Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.

I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people's lives when they go in one direction, not another.

I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space- who else?

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

Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.

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

Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.

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

Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there.

The suicide does not play the game, does not observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and leaves the other guests painfully uncomfortable.

I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.

These are the moments for which we live.

Of the widow's countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband's death the widow should think I kept myself alive.

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

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.

Each genre exerts a considerable spell, as a kind of "form" to be filled, as a Shakespearean sonnet is filled.

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

A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.