Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else's private world with our own.

That is the mystery: Reading Henry James can yield prose that is contrary to James, yet inspired by him. Who can understand this?

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

When you give up struggle, there's a kind of love.

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

Maybe, love is always forgiveness, to a degree.

A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

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

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.

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.

I am always reading or thinking about reading.

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.

It's hard to say how we compare to other people. We each inhabit our own personalities. I have often felt that I'm a very neutral being and that I have almost no personality. I'm drawn to writing partly because I'm fascinated by the mimetic process.

I don't think that any 'ism' is higher than literature or art. So I'm a formalist. I greatly honor and respect the form of a work.

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books. It may be the case that we all must write many books in order to achieve a few lasting ones - just as a young writer or poet might have to write hundreds of poems before writing his first significant one.

And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness.

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.

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.

I write in longhand and assemble lots of notes, and then I try to collate them into a coherent chronology. It's like groping along in the dark. I like writing and find it challenging, but I don't find it easy.

It would be difficult for a writer of realism to avoid suggesting a political/moral perspective in his or her fiction. "Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass.

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

the art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others.

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

When I was very little, four or five, I did comic strip drawings, so my first novel had no words. I couldn't write and thought adult handwriting was a mysterious scribble. When I was 14, my grandmother gave me a typewriter and I started writing in a different way.

I've never given up. I've always kept going. I don't feel that I could afford to give up. That would be the beginning of the end.

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

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.

Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.

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.

Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.

The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.

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.

I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of 'working' at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of the word.

A lawyer is basically a mouth, like a shark is a mouth attached to a long gut. The business of lawyers is to talk, to interrupt one another, and to devour each other if possible.

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

And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs.

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.

Mark Twain was very unhappy with himself for various reasons. He was very unhappy with America of this time. He thought it was terrible we had no anti-lynching laws, and he was also a feminist, and he was also very concerned with anti-Semitism. He was a good man, but he was hard on himself.

Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.

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.

Most people think that a widow is inhabiting some elegiac world of - it's like Mozart's 'Requiem Mass.' You know, it's very beautiful and elevated thoughts and some measure of dignity. I didn't have that experience at all. I had one pratfall after another.

I love insult, it's always honest.

Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.

I feel akin to [William] Shakespeare in the sense that, as I see it, he lived to dramatize the unfailingly exciting, unfathomably strange interplay among human beings that constitutes "scenes" in his plays, and constitutes "story" in prose fiction.

Anyone who teaches knows that you don't really experience a text until you've taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.

That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.

Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.