Top 450 Joyce Carol Oates Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

Featured in: Reading Quotes

3. “I never change, I simply become more myself.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

5. “Of the widow’s countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband’s death the widow should think I kept myself alive.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

6. “Art is the highest expression of the human spirit.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

7. “The quiet people just do their work.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

8. “The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can’t see, whose beginning you’ve forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

9. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

13. “The regional voice is the universal voice.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

14. “We work in the dark – we do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

15. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

Featured in: Running Quotes

17. “The best revenge is living well without you.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

18. “The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

19. “I used to think getting old was about vanity but actually it’s about losing people you love.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

20. “A lawyer is basically a mouth, like a shark is a mouth attached to a long gut. The business of lawyers is to talk, to interrupt one another, and to devour each other if possible.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

21. “For what is delusion but the prelude to hurt. And what is hurt but the prelude to rage.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

22. “Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

23. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

24. “A daydreamer is prepared for most things.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

25. “The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to “overcome” doubt.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

26. “Self-criticism, like self-administered brain surgery, is perhaps not a good idea. Can the ‘self’ see the ‘self’ with any objectivity?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

27. “My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

28. “When people say there is too much violence in my books, what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

29. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

30. “Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of humankind?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

31. “The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

32. “Only when men are connected to large, universal goals are they really happy-and one result of their happiness is a rush of creative activity.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

33. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

34. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

35. “I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don’t always believe in them.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

36. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

37. “Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

38. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

39. “Loneliness is like starvation: you don’t realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

40. “Exotic: meaning you’re “desired.” For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness. So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

41. “One man’s insanity is another man’s genius; someday the world will recognize the genius in my insanity.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

43. “I’m drawn to failure. I feel that I’m contending with it constantly in my own life.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

46. “Evil isn’t a cosmological riddle, only just selfish human behavior.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

47. “Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

49. “The mere passage of time makes us all exiles.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

50. “This is my life now. Absurd, but unpredictable. Not absurd because unpredictable but unpredictable because absurd. If I have lost the meaning of my life, I might still find small treasured things among the spilled and pilfered trash.”

— Joyce Carol Oates