Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

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

Writers are notoriously unable to know about themselves. Faulkner thought 'The Fable' was his best novel. F. Scott Fitzgerald liked 'Tender Is the Night,' an experimental novel.

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

Who is to blame for this most recent of sports disgraces in America? The culture that flings young athletes like Tyson up out of obscurity, makes millionaires of them and watches them self-destruct?

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.

Betrayal is the deepest wound. Betrayal is what remains of love, when love has gone.

Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.

That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.

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

Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.

In a family, what isn't spoken is what you listen for. But the noise of a family is to drown it out.

We are the species that clamors to be lied to.

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?

Like a flame is real enough, isn't it, while it's burning?-even if there's a time it goes out?

Only in love is there trust - even the possibility of trust.

I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love I love I love I love but you do not.

I really love to set things in places that are real to me.

Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard.

To love life for some men is to love fighting, for fighting, and not love, is seen as man's deepest passion.

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?

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.

The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.

To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.

Ambitious, absorbing, and poignantly moving.

You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.

I am always reading or thinking about reading.

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

Probably nothing serious or worthwhile can be accomplished without one's willingness to be alone for sustained periods of time, which is not to say that one must live alone, obsessively.

The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.

Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?

When you give up struggle, there's a kind of love.

Every scar in my face is worth it.

If I try to summon back his face, the sound of his voice, and the sensation in my stomach like a key turning in a lock when he touched me, I lose everything.

I was trying not to be happy, hopeful. I did not believe I deserved happiness or even hope, if you knew my soul.

If I'm writing, I'll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.

Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.

Love is an indescribable sensation - perhaps a conviction, a sense of certitude.

Most people who are writers go through periods when they can't write.

Strange: how when a light is extinguished, it's immediately as if it has never been. Darkness fills in again, complete.

The body can't distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.

Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.

Even as a young child, I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.

A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.

I am what would be called a 'mainstream feminist,' not a radical feminist.

I could never take the idea of religion very seriously.

celebrate while you can

From Mother you will inherit the belief that you can journey to your fate, there's a place to be located on a map that's destiny. If only you can get there. If it isn't too late. If no one stops you.

In a sense, I may not consciously know what I'm doing. I feel that I'm telling a story. I'm a kind of medium by which something is transmitted.

I've never given up. I've always kept going. I don't feel that I could afford to give up. That would be the beginning of the end.

I think what distresses me most in my life is that I have so many ideas I consider exciting ideas that I will never live to execute because it takes me so long to execute.