Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

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.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

I never change, I simply become more myself.

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

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

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

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

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming - In thinking, not writing.

Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

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.

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

It's where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we really are.

Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.

Ultimately, we measure ourselves against our own ideas of idealism and perfection, and we don't always come very close to them.

Look at the world and see what's there. It's very beautiful. It's a very exciting but in some ways treacherous world, and all this goes into the writing.

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

Self-criticism is an art not many are qualified to practice.

The mere passage of time makes us all exiles.

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.

Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.

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.

Fiction that adds up, that suggests a "logical consistency," or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.

In love there are two things - bodies and words.

I used to think getting old was about vanity but actually it's about losing people you love.

Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.

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

Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.

The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.

I write so much because my cat sits on my lap. She purrs so I don't want to get up. She's so much more calming than my husband.

"Because there has been no one to stop me" has been one of the principles of my life.

The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.

Boxing has become America's tragic theater.

All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later.

The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.

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.

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don't have ordinarily.

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?

The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.

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

It's very hard to be an experimental woman writer. If I had been writing under a pseudonym, just initials, I might have a different reputation - but, then I couldn't be myself either.

Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.

Loneliness is dangerous ... because if aloneness does not lead to God, it leads to the devil. It leads to the self.

The quiet people just do their work.

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