Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

153 Sourced Quotes

When people say there is too much violence in [my books], what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.

Joyce Carol Oates
Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books.

Joyce Carol Oates
The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.

Joyce Carol Oates
Doesn't everyone feel rather exiled?... the mere passage of time makes us all exiles.

Joyce Carol Oates
Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don't want them. What I want is a voice.

Joyce Carol Oates
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.

Joyce Carol Oates
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?

Joyce Carol Oates
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.

Joyce Carol Oates
When we claim to remember our pasts, we are surely remembering our favorite snapshots, in which the long-faded past is given a distinct visual immortality.

Joyce Carol Oates
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.

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

Joyce Carol Oates
It is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin; another's voice; another's soul.

Joyce Carol Oates
When poets — write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane.

Joyce Carol Oates
Budapest in late May is a city of lilacs. The sweet, languid, rather sleepy smell of lilacs wafts everywhere. And it is a city of lovers, many of them quite middle-aged. Walking with their arms around each other, embracing and kissing on park benches. A sensuousness very much bound up (it seems to me) with the heady ubiquitous smell of lilacs.

Joyce Carol Oates
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.

Joyce Carol Oates
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.

Joyce Carol Oates
Old women snore violently. They are like bodies into which bizarre animals have crept at night; the animals are vicious, bawdy, noisy. How they snore! There is no shame to their snoring. Old women turn into old men.

Joyce Carol Oates
The quintessential American city. That fast-beating stubborn heart.

Joyce Carol Oates
Self-criticism, like self-administered brain surgery, is perhaps not a good idea. Can the 'self' see the 'self' with any objectivity?

Joyce Carol Oates
Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.

Joyce Carol Oates
The body can't distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.

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

Joyce Carol Oates
There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time.

Joyce Carol Oates
[The] third man in the ring makes boxing possible.

Joyce Carol Oates
At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it.

Joyce Carol Oates
I read books. Avidly, ardently! As if my life depended upon it.

Joyce Carol Oates
He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.

Joyce Carol Oates
Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off a light.

Joyce Carol Oates
Society is the picnic certain individuals leave early, the party they fail to enjoy, the musical comedy they find not worth the price of admission.

Joyce Carol Oates
One gains a certain hold on one's life
by boldly casting it aside.

Joyce Carol Oates