Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

153 Sourced Quotes

To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.

Joyce Carol Oates
For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?

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

Joyce Carol Oates
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.

Joyce Carol Oates
Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning? Even if there's a time it goes out?

Joyce Carol Oates
In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolved

Joyce Carol Oates
Nothing is accidental in the universe — this is one of my Laws of Physics — except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity.

Joyce Carol Oates
The blow you can't see coming is the blow that knocks you out.

Joyce Carol Oates
There is the expectation that a younger generation has the opportunity to redeem the crimes and failings of their elders and would have the strength and idealism to do so.

Joyce Carol Oates
Loneliness is dangerous. It's bad for you to be alone, to be lonely, because if aloneness does not lead to God, it leads to the devil. It leads to self.

Joyce Carol Oates
He had made the transition from 'promising' to 'established' without anything in between, like most middle-aged critics of prominence.

Joyce Carol Oates
Our house is made of glass …and our lives are made of glass; and there is nothing we can do to protect ourselves.

Joyce Carol Oates
Not even the most devastating truth can be told; it must be evoked.

Joyce Carol Oates
Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?

Joyce Carol Oates
The only people who claim that money is not important are people who have enough money so that they are relieved of the ugly burden of thinking about it.

Joyce Carol Oates
Like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth.

Joyce Carol Oates
Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork.

Joyce Carol Oates
Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.

Joyce Carol Oates
While there are 'women writers' there are not, and have never been, 'men writers.' This is an empty category, a class without specimens; for the noun 'writer' — the very verb 'writing' — always implies masculinity.

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
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
You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter.

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

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

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

Joyce Carol Oates
Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.

Joyce Carol Oates