Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

153 Sourced Quotes

It's rare that we actively and consciously 'forget'; most of the time we have simply forgotten, with no consciousness of having forgotten. In individuals, the phenomenon is called 'denial'; in entire cultures and nations, it's usually called 'history.'

Joyce Carol Oates
Near the point of impact, time accelerates to the speed of light.

Joyce Carol Oates
We are stimulated to emotional response not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.

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
He did not like children; he instinctively feared their honesty.

Joyce Carol Oates
Detroit, my 'great' subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am - for better or worse.

Joyce Carol Oates
Boxing is an American sport — a 'so-called sport' to many — in which images of incalculable beauty and violence, desperation and ingenuity, are routinely entwined; the sport that evokes the most extreme reactions — loathing, revulsion, righteous indignation; a fierce and often inexplicable loyalty.

Joyce Carol Oates
And what is 'art'? — a firestorm rushing through Time, arising from no visible source and conforming to no principles of logic or causality.

Joyce Carol Oates
She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.

Joyce Carol Oates
The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it's the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct.

Joyce Carol Oates
The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me.

Joyce Carol Oates
Why should I want what's good for me?' Beatrice asked him, smiling. 'Is that what you want for yourself - only what's good for you?

Joyce Carol Oates
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.

Joyce Carol Oates
When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity — but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.

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

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

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

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

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
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
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
Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.

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