Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

What is a family, after all, except memories? Haphazard and precious as the contents of a catch-all drawer in the kitchen.

The joyous fulfillment of your sex : the sacred duties of beloved wife, and helpmeet, and mother. In opposition to the vulgar and mercantile hurly-burly of the great world, the idyllic pleasures of the domestic hearth-the which, I firmly believe, make of one small room an everywhere, indeed; and provide us with that small measure of bliss, which is, if we are greatly fortunate, and deserving, Our Lord's promise to us, of the Heaven to come.

Acting is the loneliest profession I know.

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

As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era; and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University.

Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.

There is a terrible weight in all kinds of beauty

It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing--how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are; because you've said them so many times, your 'principles,' your 'ideals'--and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.

I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called 'culture' - and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species.

I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hardworking.

I think what distresses me most in my life is that I have so many ideas I consider exciting ideas that I will never live to execute because it takes me so long to execute.

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.

In families there are frequently matters of which no one speaks, nor even alludes. There are no words for these matters. As the binding skeleton beneath the flesh is never acknowledged by us and, when at last it defines itself, is after all an obscenity.

At all crucial moments in our lives we want to speak without knowing what to say.

My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.

It's one of those secrets that's embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students.

After my husband died, I could not write much - I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time even to contemplate writing. But I did take notes - not for fiction, but for a journal, or diary, of this terrible time. I did not think that I would ever survive this interlude.

Death is just the last scene of the last act.

Most people who are writers go through periods when they can't write.

Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.

Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.

My parents inspired me by their example. They both grew up in the Depression, and both of them had to quit school when they were quite young to work, because there actually was no choice. So they've always impressed me with their resilience, their good spirits, their courage. I just remember them carrying on and just doing their lives. They really made a strong impression on me.

There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it's gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.

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

Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.

All actors are whores. They want only one thing: to seduce you.

The punishment – to the body, the brain, the spirit – a man must endure to become even a moderately good boxer is inconceivable to most of us whose idea of personal risk is largely ego-related or emotional.

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.

Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsessions, to resist what is, to defy one's elders, even to the point of ostracism; to define oneself, and by extension one's generation, as new, novel, ungovernable.

Blood transforms the warm bath water and, in it, I see weakly that this was a mistake. The razor's cut is not deep, nevertheless the blood rushes out happily in the warm water as if kin to it, the same tender substance. Rising a new person transformed with an icy sense of error I go to the sink and turn on cold water which is not friendly to blood. The cut is deeper than imagined.

The American dream is a multi-metaphor made up of distinct regions. Many regions of this country are almost like different countries. Even in one state, northern and southern California are like two separate countries.

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.

I have read on a Kindle. But the Kindle we had only worked for about eight months then it stopped working. You don't have to get books repaired.

The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.

If my favorite, most comfortable place is by our fireplace in cold weather, expedient places are on an airplane, in a waiting room or even waiting in line; frequently these days, while on the phone having been 'put on hold.'

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

Later, her first intense, serious love affair, yes then she'd lost something more tangible, if undefinable: her heart? her independence? her control of, definition of, self? That first true loss, the furious bafflement of it. And never again quite so assured, confident.

What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.

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.

If Shakespeare's great plays are variants of stories, even novels, you can see how each character is telling his story from his perspective; each is vying with the others for dominance, but in the end, in tragedy, most of these voices will die, to be replaced by the yet more vigorous voice of a younger generation.

Betrayal is the deepest wound. Betrayal is what remains of love, when love has gone.

Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.

I am what would be called a 'mainstream feminist,' not a radical feminist.

If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

I turn down invitations to do things for money. I have almost no interest in making money. Actually, I've acquired a fair amount of money that I will never live to spend. So earning money, in a way, depresses me, because I feel it's just piling up.

I see the world in ways that might be considered somewhat harsh and Darwinistic. At the same time mediated, as in Darwin, by a real idealism and an excitement about the possibilities of the intellect and imagination to deal with this somewhat brutal world.

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.