Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

The use of language is all we have to pit against death and silence.

My writing is full of lives I might have led.

Not what the mind sees, but what the mind imagines the eye must see.

What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.

The regional voice is the universal voice.

It must happen to everyone. The last time you make love, you can't know it will be the last.

A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.

Is there any mystery like who you finally turn out to be.

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

An actress wants to be seen. An actress wants to be loved. By multitudes of people, not just one lone man.

Exotic: meaning you're "desired." For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.

She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, "Why are you trying to starve yourself?" To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all.

It feels good, honey, but it isn't love.

After love a formal feeling comes.

If you're living with a scientist, you see the world differently than you do with a humanist. It's in some ways very subtle, the differences in perceiving reality.

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

You don't have to understand why anything that has happened nor do you even have to understand what it is that has happened. You have only to live with the remains.

Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.

Like all virtuous people he imagines he must speak the truth.

There is no PAST anybody can get to, to alter things or even to know what those things were but there is definitely a future, we are already in it.

God's blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.

When a marriage ends, who is left to understand it?

None of the rest of my life figures here.

Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.

the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.

Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.

Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.

It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.

The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it won't last; nothing can guarantee it.

For politics is in its essence as Adams had said, the 'systematic organization of hatred': either you were organized or you were not.

It's always a challenge to discover the most effective first sentence, and the most effective final sentence, in a chapter for instance, and in the book as a whole.

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.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; it's not just typing. It takes a while to get that voice.

On the elusive gift of blending austerity of craft with elasticity of allure.

Acting is the loneliest profession I know.

The appeal of writing is primarily the investigation of mystery.

I don't think that any 'ism' is higher than literature or art. So I'm a formalist. I greatly honor and respect the form of a work.

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

Often in gothic novels there's a large house, an estate, and it's symbolic of that culture. Usually it's sort of moldering or rotted or something, and sometimes it's a whole community.

... such speculation is like staring into the hot white sun. you know the sun is there but you can't see a thing.

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.

When I'm really involved or getting towards the end of a novel, I can write for up to ten hours a day. At those times, it's as though I'm writing a letter to someone I'm desperately in love with.

It's one of those secrets that's embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students.

To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box.

I come from people who did not go to college. They didn't even finish high school. People who one might call ordinary Americans who are very hardworking.

The despairing soul is a rebel.

What is a family, after all, except memories? Haphazard and precious as the contents of a catch-all drawer in the kitchen.

Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing.

And so you must grant to God what is God and not try to think of what you have lost, for that way is madness.