Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

153 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Joyce Carol Oates
Whoever was stupid was beneath worry or thought; you did not have to figure them out. This eliminated hundreds of people. In this life you had time only for a certain amount of thinking, and there was no need to waste any of it on people who were not threatening.

Joyce Carol Oates
Better to be despised, then, than to be ignored; or damned with condescending praise.

Joyce Carol Oates
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.

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

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

Joyce Carol Oates
Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.

Joyce Carol Oates
Just as our historical beginnings are utterly mysterious-why are we born? why when and as we are?-so too are the beginnings of works of art and of "artists.

Joyce Carol Oates
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.

Joyce Carol Oates
What is memory but the repository of things doomed to be forgotten, so you must have History. You must have labor to invent History. Being faithful to all that happens to you of significance, recording days, dates, events, names, sights not relying merely upon memory which fades like a Polaroid print where you see the memory fading before your eyes like time itself retreating.

Joyce Carol Oates
My nature is orderly and observant and scrupulous and deeply introverted.

Joyce Carol Oates
Yet the fact had no consciousness of itself except through me.

Joyce Carol Oates
The secret of being a writer: not to expect others to value what you've done as you value it. Not to expect anyone else to perceive in it the emotions you have invested in it. Once this is understood, all will be well.

Joyce Carol Oates
Language is the instrument in all cases and can language be trusted?If it were not for language, could we lie?

Joyce Carol Oates
To love life for some men is to love fighting, for fighting, and not love, is seen as man's deepest passion.

Joyce Carol Oates
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.

Joyce Carol Oates
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?

Joyce Carol Oates
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.

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

Joyce Carol Oates
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.

Joyce Carol Oates
For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

Joyce Carol Oates