Top 450 Joyce Carol Oates Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Boxing is rough. Even if you win, you get hurt.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

153. “The despairing soul is a rebel.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

154. “Any kind of creative activity is likely to be stressful. The more anxiety, the more you feel that you are headed in the right direction. Easiness, relaxation, comfort – these are not conditions that usually accompany serious work.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

155. “She examined me, she looked at me critically and said, “Why are you trying to starve yourself?” To keep myself from feeling love, from feeling lust, from feeling anything at all.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

156. “Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

158. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

162. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

165. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

168. “How mysterious it is, to be in love. For you can be in love with one who knows nothing of you. Perhpas our greatest happinesses spring from such longings-being in love with one who is oblivious of you.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

169. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

171. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

173. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

175. “The best part of being a nanny, Katya thought, was reading children’s books aloud to enraptured children like Tricia, for no one had read such books aloud to her when she’d been a little girl. There hadn’t been such books in the Spivak household on County Line Road, nor would there have been any time for such interludes.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

191. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

193. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

195. “Perhaps the inevitable tragedy of our complex civilization is that we must be specialists in our fields – and our fields have become increasingly difficult, so that communication is nearly impossible.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

197. “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

198. “Secrets of the adult universe, forbidden for children to know: how beauty and suffering are intertwined.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

199. “Marianne laughed. But you can’t disappoint me! I don’t love you.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

200. “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