Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

Art originates in play - in improvisation, experiment, and fantasy; it remains forever, in its deepest instincts, playful and spontaneous, an exercise of the imagination analogous to the exercising of the physical body to no purpose other than ecstatic release.

A writer who has published as many books as I have has developed, of necessity, a hide like a rhino's, while inside there dwells a frail, hopeful butterfly of a spirit.

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.

Writing allows for fictitious voices - the voices of persons unlike myself - that might otherwise be muted.

A daydreamer is prepared for most things.

you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.

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

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.

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

The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.

I've always been interested in writing about people, including young children who are not able to speak for themselves. As in my novel 'Black Water,' I provide a voice for someone who has died and can't speak for herself.

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.

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.

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.

The appeal of writing is primarily the investigation of mystery.

I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.

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.

Boxing has become America's tragic theater.

Often in gothic novels there's a large house, an estate, and it's symbolic of that culture. Usually it's sort of moldering or rotted or something, and sometimes it's a whole community.

Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.

I can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing--for one of those bouts that go on and on, round following round, jabs, missed punches, clinches, nothing determined, again the bell and again and you and your opponent so evenly matched it's impossible not to see that your opponent is you.... Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.

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.

Dear girl! Life is addictive. Yet we must live.

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

Each time I undertake to reread Virginia Woolf, I am somewhat baffled by the signature breathlessness and relentlessly "poetic" tone, the shimmering impressionism, so very different from the vivid, precise, magisterial (and often very funny) prose of her contemporary James Joyce.

Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.

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

It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to write, however entirely different one's writing will be.

Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.

The best revenge is living well without you.

Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.

Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.

God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.

The regional voice is the universal voice.

Except that awards are competitive, which is a negative thing, they are wonderful for singling out deserving individuals and bringing their work to the attention of many potential readers who might otherwise have been totally unaware of them.

An actress wants to be seen. An actress wants to be loved. By multitudes of people, not just one lone man.

The great happiness in life in creativity belongs to amateurs.

I am more or less reading all the time.

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

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

... such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing.

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

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.

My life is a very interior and solitary life. I tend not to care that much about external things.

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

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

If a book I've committed myself to review turns out to be 'disappointing' I make an effort to present it objectively to the reader, including a good number of excerpts from the text, so that the reader might form his or her own opinion independent of my own.