Top 450 Joyce Carol Oates Quotes (2023 Update)
Page 4 of 10

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

152. “Not even the most devastating truth can be told; it must be evoked.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

155. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

157. “Childhood is the province of the imagination and when I immerse myself in it, I re-create it as it was, as it could have been, as I wanted – and didn’t want – it to be.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

158. “The heavenly light you admire is fossil-light, it’s the unfathomably distant past you gaze into, stars long extinct.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

159. “Boxing has become America’s tragic theater.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

160. “Can compromise be an art? Yes – but a minor art.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

161. “Novels begin, not on the page, but in meditation and day-dreaming – In thinking, not writing.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

162. “A predatory bird with a great sharp beak and vicious talons – Paradox. To be in its grip is to suffer, yet so exquisitely, one might mistake the experience for a kind of ecstasy.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

163. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

164. “The danger of motherhood. you relive your early self, through the eyes of your mother.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

165. “Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

166. “Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

167. “I can manifest my neurotical emotions, emancipate an epicureal instinct, and elaborate on my heterosexual tendencies.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

168. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

169. “The challenge is, to live in a house from which meaning has departed, like air leaking from a balloon. A slow leak, yet lethal. And one day, the balloon is flat: it is not a balloon any longer. By.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

170. “How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

171. “Great art is cathartic; it is always moral.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

172. “What is destiny – a mechanical fact, a theoretical possibility, a concept, a superstition, a mere word? Ian McCullough was inclined to think one or another of these depending upon his mood. Destiny, the seemingly benign verso of fate.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

173. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

174. “Any writer who has difficulty in writing is probably not onto his true subject, but wasting time with false, petty goals; as soon as you connect with your true subject you will write.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

175. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

176. “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

177. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

179. “Now the broken-off parts of her life, the fragments, bits, puzzle pieces, began to fall into place, to assemble themselves, as invariably they do once we are under the enchantment of Death.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

180. “Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

181. “A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

182. “The novel is perhaps the highest art form because it so closely resembles life: it is about human relationships. It’s technique, page by page, resembles our technique of living day by day-a way of relating.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

184. “The despairing soul is a rebel.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

185. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

186. “Like a flame is real enough, isn’t it, while it’s burning?-even if there’s a time it goes out?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

187. “I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of ‘working’ at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don’t think of them as work in the usual sense of the word.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

188. “I haven’t any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that I don’t take a break for many hours – and consequently have breakfast at two or three in the afternoon on good days.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

189. “The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his efforts, he believes in the future.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

190. “SO RISKY, to love another person! Like flaying your own, outermost skin. Exposed to the crude air and every kind of infection.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

192. “That’s how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

193. “Unfamiliar places could be more dangerous than familiar places, unexpectedly. The boy had been discovering that an unfamiliar place was more easily “haunted” than a familiar place simply because there was less there to distract the memory.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

194. “And that’s the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a “good” mother in the world’s eyes or a “bad” mother, how everything in a woman’s life is funneled through her body between her legs.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

195. “After love a formal feeling comes.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

196. “You can think of your life as the mistakes you made that catch up with you finally.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

197. “Detroit, my ‘great’ subject, made me the person I am, consequently the writer I am – for better or worse.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

198. “Your punishment if you’re a woman. Not loved enough.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

199. “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.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

200. “First marriage, and nothing so sweet! You don’t know it at the time.”

— Joyce Carol Oates