Top 75 Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

I think whenever we think of our hometowns, we tend to think of very specific people: with whom you rode on the school bus, who was your next door neighbor you were playing with, who your girlfriend was. It’s always something very specific.

I was brought up to be sympathetic toward others.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

Where we come from in America no longer signifies. It’s where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are.

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

The cleaning is something I use as a reward if I get some work done. I go into a very happy state of mind when I’m vacuuming.

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.

Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn’t require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice.

A lot of widows feel that they have betrayed their spouse by continuing to live. It’s deranged thinking. I know that, but that doesn’t stop you feeling it.

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

I don’t feel I write fast. I write in longhand and do so much revision. On the page, it’s so old-fashioned. I could write a whole novel on scrap paper, scribbles and things. I keep looking at it and something develops. For me, using a word processor would mean staring at a screen for too many hours.

Princeton is quite integrated. Women are professors at Princeton. Women are students at Princeton. That began in the 1970s.

I don’t think I’m morbid by nature. Serious writers have always written about serious subjects. Lighthearted material doesn’t appeal to me, and I don’t read it. I think I’m a realist, with a realistic sensibility of history and the tragedy of history.

I would suggest the widow do things the husband used to do, so he seems to be there with you. You will feel like just going to bed. It’s so wonderful, going to bed.

I think it’s very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let other people speak… to travel… to experience the world. And memorialize it.

The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.

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

I could never take the idea of religion very seriously.

The historical Woodrow Wilson suffered from numerous complaints which we might today label as psychosomatic. Yet, Wilson did have a stroke as a relatively young man of 39 and seemed always to be ill. He was ‘high-strung’ – intensely neurotic – yet a charismatic personality nonetheless.

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

Yes, ‘Black Girl/White Girl’ might be described as a ‘coming-of-age’ novel, at least for the survivor Genna. It is also intended as a comment on race relations in America more generally: we are ‘roommates’ with one another, but how well do we know one another?

I have read on a Kindle. But the Kindle we had only worked for about eight months then it stopped working. You don’t have to get books repaired.

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

I’m drawn to failure. I feel like I’m contending with it constantly in my own life.

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

My own way of writing is very meditated and, despite my reputation, rather slow-moving. So I do spend a good deal of time contemplating endings. The final ending is usually arrived at simply by intuition.

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

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

Sometimes I read reviews, and without exception I will read critical essays that are sent to me. The critical essays are interesting on their own terms.

Among many of my friends and acquaintances, I seem to be one of the very few individuals who felt or feels no ambivalence about my mother. All my feelings for my mother were positive, very strong and abiding.

As a child. I grew up on a small farm, so I did a lot of drawings of animals, chickens and people. At the bottom of every page, I’d put a strange scribble. I was emulating adult handwriting, though I didn’t actually know how to write.

I write in longhand and assemble lots of notes, and then I try to collate them into a coherent chronology. It’s like groping along in the dark. I like writing and find it challenging, but I don’t find it easy.

As a teacher at Princeton, I’m surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don’t really think of it as work – writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.

I think all art comes out of conflict. When I write I am always looking for the dramatic kernel of an event, the junctures of people’s lives when they go in one direction, not another.

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

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

Yes, I’ve listened to just a few audiobooks – but hope to listen to more. I’ve wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening, and not reading, quite fascinating.

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.

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.

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.

In love there are two things – bodies and words.

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.

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.

I don’t read for amusement, I read for enlightenment. I do a lot of reviewing, so I have a steady assignment of reading. I’m also a judge for the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, which gives awards to literature and nonfiction.

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

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.

I should say, one of the things about being a widow or a widower, you really, really need a sense of humor, because everything’s going to fall apart.

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.

For some reason, voters can be brainwashed, and they vote sometimes against their own best interests, let alone voting against the interests of people who need them, like people who are disenfranchised and people who are poor and so forth.

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

I’ve always been interested in writing about people, including young children who are not able to speak for themselves. As in my novel ‘Black Water,’ I provide a voice for someone who has died and can’t speak for herself.

Except that awards are competitive, which is a negative thing, they are wonderful for singling out deserving individuals and bringing their work to the attention of many potential readers who might otherwise have been totally unaware of them.

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

My students often say, ‘My roommate read this story and really liked it,’ and it’s hard to convince them that there are things wrong with it. I say, ‘Well, people who love you want you to be happy. But I’m your professor and I’m supposed to be teaching you something.’

After my husband died, I could not write much – I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time even to contemplate writing. But I did take notes – not for fiction, but for a journal, or diary, of this terrible time. I did not think that I would ever survive this interlude.

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.

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim.