Welcome to our collection of quotes by Joyce Carol Oates. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014, and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. She is a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches short fiction.
Oates was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2016.
Our house is made of glass and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.
The first sentence can't be written until the final sentence is written.
There is a terrible weight in all kinds of beauty.
The domestic lives we live which may be accidental, or not entirely of our making help to make possible our writing lives; our imaginations are freed, or stimulated, by the very prospect of companionship, quiet, a predictable and consoling routine.
The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.
Most people who are writers go through periods when they can't write.
One man's insanity is another man's genius; someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity.
How lawyers make work for one another! You're all priests, worshipping the same god. No wonder you adore one another.
Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.
See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be.
Ambitious, absorbing, and poignantly moving.
For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.
Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.
Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.
Can compromise be an art? Yes -- but a minor art.
Great art is cathartic; it is always moral.
Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?
A diverse and lively collection, the highest art of the interview.
Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.
Better to be despised, then, than to be ignored; or damned with condescending praise.
Early publication can be a dubious blessing: we all know writers who would give anything not to have published their first book, and go about trying to buy up all existing copies.
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.
Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.
The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.
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?
There is something female about being dead.
-So you don't believe we have souls I guess? and Legs laughed and said, Yeah probably we do but why's that mean we're gonna last forever? Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?
Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.
Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of humankind?
I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.
A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?
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.
And that smell of masculine indignation, rage like something singed.
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.
Failure is a human condition, not victory over odds; for each Hellen Keller who triumphs, there are tens of millions who fail, mute and deaf and insensate as vegetables tossed upon a vast garbage pile to rot.
Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments; it stirs our capacity for dreaming.
Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.
How mysterious it is, to be in love. For you can be in love with one who knows nothing of you. Perhpas our greatest happinesses spring from such longings-being in love with one who is oblivious of you.
Popular! In America, what else matters?
On the way home Mary Lou said, Some things are so sad you can't say them. But I pretended not to hear.
People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.
Your punishment if you're a woman. Not loved enough.
For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.
The Bog Kingdom. Bidding him enter! Ah, enter! There, all wishes are fulfilled. The more forbidden, the more delicious.
The despairing soul is a rebel.
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.
How tired Dabney is, of genteel conversation; of his mother, whose love for him is stifling as damp cotton batting, and her tedious relatives of whom not one is younger than she, and no one is near the age of her restless son.
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.
How does the poet transform his banal thoughts (are not most thoughts banal?) into such stunning forms, into beauty?
Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.
Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.
Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
(Yet I remember little. Or nothing. A chloroformed handkerchief, perhaps; a stinging and burning sensation afterward, when required to make water--(as Nanny called it); ah, is it not distasteful, ugly--andamp; too trifling to be recalled.).
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.
Tragedy is the highest form of art.
Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?If it were not for language, could we lie?
He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.
Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer's vision.
This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash.
Why the need, rising in some very nearly to the level of compulsion, to verify experience by way of language?-to scrupulously record and preserve the very passing of Time?
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.
Every scar in my face is worth it.
God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.
I used to think getting old was about vanity but actually it's about losing people you love.
On the elusive gift of blending austerity of craft with elasticity of allure.
Though words sometimes puzzled Alma, she never looked up any word in any dictionary; a word was like a pebble to be turned briefly in the hand, and tossed away, with no expectation that it would be encountered again.
We are the species that clamors to be lied to.
Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.
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.
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.
The fetus wished to live. Stubbornly, sometimes astonishingly-the fetus struggled to live. But the power of its life-or its death-had to reside with the mother. No other alternative was possible.
If this was a flirtation -- and it felt like a flirtation -- it was like no other flirtation in Katya's experience: with a man old enough to be her grandfather?
Time is the enemy of lovers. Worse even than the frank light of day.
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.
I wrote a novel called Blonde, which is about Norma Jean Baker, who becomes Marilyn Monroe, which I called a fictitious biography. That uses the material as if it were myth -- that Marilyn Monroe is like this mythical figure in our culture.
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 rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs; otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in terms of the characters whom the voices express.
The music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.
Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.
Longer Version:
Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be. In running the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.
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.
I could EAT YOUR HEART and asshole you'd never know it.
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.
Her problem wasn't she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn't a blonde and she wasn't dumb.
Only where there is life can there be home.