Top 450 Joyce Carol Oates Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “When poets – write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

102. “The despairing soul is a rebel.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

104. “The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

105. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

106. “Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

107. “To be knocked out doesn’t mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

108. “What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She’d become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

109. “How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into elastic patterns called “sentences.” And these sentences into paragraphs, and beyond.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

110. “Most people who are writers go through periods when they can’t write.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

112. “We begin as children imagining and fearing ghosts. By degrees, through our long lives, we come to be the very ghosts inhabiting the lost landscapes of our childhood.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

113. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

114. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

115. “The mysteries of the female sex! We men can never hope to fathom your depths, but only try not to drown in them.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

116. “Fame’s carapace does not allow for easy breathing.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

117. “The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

118. “I believe in uttering the truth, even if it hurts. Particularly if it hurts.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

119. “After love a formal feeling comes.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

120. “In dreams sometimes it is like this. I am lying very still, my arms and legs are numb or paralyzed. There is a medical term – peripheral neuropathy. A tingling sensation in fingers and toes that moves upward bringing with it a loss of feeling, a spreading numbness, a kind of amnesia of the body.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

121. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

Featured in: Breakup Quotes

122. “Sometimes people surprise us. People we believe we know.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

123. “Honorary degrees and lifetime achievement awards are very encouraging. I know that it might sound strange that a writer who has published many books still needs encouragement, but this is true.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

124. “Memory blurs, that’s the point. If memory didn’t blur you wouldn’t have the fool’s courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

127. “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

128. “The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

130. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

Featured in: Reading Quotes

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

137. “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

Featured in: Reading Quotes

138. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

141. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

143. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

145. “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

146. “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

147. “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

148. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

150. “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