Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

I learned long ago that being Lewis Carroll was infinitely more exciting than being Alice.

These are the moments for which we live.

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

There is a terrible weight in all kinds of beauty

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

Her problem wasn't she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn't a blonde and she wasn't dumb.

My grandmother could never have written a memoir, so 'The Gravedigger's Daughter' is a homage to her life, and to the lives of other young women of her generation, which are so rarely articulated.

Boxing is rough. Even if you win, you get hurt.

One of life's minor satisfactions is forgetting.

Fame's carapace does not allow for easy breathing.

Any writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject you will write.

It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.

The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.

My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.

The great happiness in life in creativity belongs to amateurs.

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

For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.

One writes to memorialize, and to bring to life again that which has been lost.

I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.

Art is the highest expression of the human spirit.

As soon as I moved to Princeton in 1978, I became fascinated by local history, much of it Revolutionary War-era; and I became fascinated by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson at Princeton University.

A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.'

I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I've written.

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

Novels usually evolve out of 'character.' Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.

My life is a very interior and solitary life. I tend not to care that much about external things.

Near the point of impact, time acelerates to the speed of light.

Evil isn't a cosmological riddle, only just selfish human behavior.

People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.

[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness.

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.

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.

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

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.

When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.

I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.

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

This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.

The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.

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

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.

Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.

Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you're no longer their child.

I was brought up to be sympathetic toward others.

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

One man's insanity is another man's genius; someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity.

You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.

Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.

My self is all to me. I don't have any need of you.