Top 450 Joyce Carol Oates Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

102. “Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsessions, to resist what is, to defy one’s elders, even to the point of ostracism; to define oneself, and by extension one’s generation, as new, novel, ungovernable.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

105. “She wasn’t in love but she would love him, if that would save her.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

107. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

109. “All that matters in life is forging deep ties of love and family and friends. Writing and reading come later.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

111. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

112. “I write so much because my cat sits on my lap. She purrs so I don’t want to get up. She’s so much more calming than my husband.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

113. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

114. “The secret of being a writer: not to expect others to value what you’ve done as you value it. Not to expect anyone else to perceive in it the emotions you have invested in it. Once this is understood, all will be well.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

115. “I am infatuated with the private life, and with anonymity; perhaps even invisibility.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

116. “If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

118. “We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once it’s gone – its value is incontestable.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

119. “Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

120. “The great happiness in life in creativity belongs to amateurs.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

121. “I had forgotten that time wasn’t fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

122. “I’m nobody’s daughter now. I’m through with that.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

123. “The suicide does not play the game, does not observe the rules. He leaves the party too soon, and leaves the other guests painfully uncomfortable.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

124. “A good, sympathetic review is always a wonderful surprise.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

125. “Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer’s vision.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

126. “If my favorite, most comfortable place is by our fireplace in cold weather, expedient places are on an airplane, in a waiting room or even waiting in line; frequently these days, while on the phone having been ‘put on hold.’”

— Joyce Carol Oates

127. “These are the moments for which we live.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

130. “Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

131. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

132. “Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

133. “Never can you climb over this wall, you’re not strong enough; girls aren’t strong enough; girls aren’t big enough; your body is fragile and breakable, like a doll; your body is a doll; your body is for others to admire and to pet; your body is to be used by others, not used by you; your body is a luscious fruit for others to bite into and to savor; your body is for others, not for you.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

134. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

136. “A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

138. “The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

140. “God’s blessing is not always to be distinguished from His wrath.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

141. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

142. “Writing is a consequence of having been ‘haunted’ by material. Why this is, no one knows.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

143. “I wrote a novel called ‘Blonde,’ which is about Norma Jean Baker, who becomes Marilyn Monroe, which I called a fictitious biography. That uses the material as if it were myth – that Marilyn Monroe is like this mythical figure in our culture.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

146. “It feels good, honey, but it isn’t love.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

147. “And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo – that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

148. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

149. “Out of obscurity I came. To obscurity I can return.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

150. “Boxing is rough. Even if you win, you get hurt.”

— Joyce Carol Oates