Top 450 Joyce Carol Oates Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man’s body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don’t don’t don’t don’t leave me. DON’T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

252. “Love is not enough to keep us from harm.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

253. “Her favorite foods made her gag, like old friends she hadn’t seen in years turning up looking all wrong.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

254. “I would suggest the widow do things the husband used to do, so he seems to be there with you. You will feel like just going to bed. It’s so wonderful, going to bed.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

255. “But you are a solace just by existing, vividly in my thoughts if not here before me.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

256. “I compose most of my tweets with care, as if they were aphorisms – they are not usually dashed-off. Sometimes I’m surprised by the high, poetic quality of Twitter – it lends itself to a surreal sort of self-expression.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

257. “Novels usually evolve out of ‘character.’ Characters generate stories, and the shape of a novel is entirely imagined but should have an aesthetic coherence.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

258. “I am always reading or thinking about reading.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

259. “A familiar story, Marya instructs herself – a woman yearning to be completed in a man, by way of a man. As if she hadn’t a soul of her own.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

260. “My governing principle as a critic is to call attention solely to books and writers that merit such attention, and to avoid whenever possible reviewing books “negatively” except in those instances in which the “negative” is countered by an admiring consideration of earlier books by the same author.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

261. “Is there any mystery like who you finally turn out to be.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

262. “Critics sometimes appear to be addressing themselves to works other than those I remember writing.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

263. “When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

264. “There should really not be anything gratuitous in a work of art. Sometimes what seems as if it’s gratuitous may be a passage in which a character is being characterized so that the reader comes to know him or her better.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

265. “When there is no longer any point in lying, no one will lie.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

266. “Better to be despised, then, than to be ignored; or damned with condescending praise.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

267. “Katya laughed and shrugged. She was a hired girl; she said such things on order. Much of her life was this sort of semiskilled playing to other people, usually older people, with the hope of making them like her; making them feel that she was valuable to them; wresting some of their power from them, if but fleetingly. It was like provoking a boy or a man to want you. That could be risky, as Katya well knew.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

268. “Like many shy people, once he began talking he seemed not to know how to stop; he lacked the social sleight of hand to change the subject, and he had no idea how to engage another person. Like a runaway vehicle, he plunged on, heedless.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

269. “The – the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

270. “Not to be alone. To be spared the possibility of knowing oneself, in aloneness.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

271. “Near the point of impact, time acelerates to the speed of light.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

272. “A man is fearful of lonely in a woman.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

273. “For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

274. “None of the rest of my life figures here.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

275. “Being a grand-kid, you can so easily regress. All the ages you ever were are all recalled by the grandparent in a shimmery love-haze, like those blurred faces on tv, in which identities have been disguised.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

276. “Our lives can only be interpreted in retrospect, yet must be lived from day to day, blindly. What folly, the human condition!”

— Joyce Carol Oates

277. “Food doesn’t exist, but can only be invented. And reinvented.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

278. “Momma used to say, you got to know when to move. More important than knowing when to stay put.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

279. “You can’t deny Eros. Eros wills trike, like lightning. Our human defenses are frail, ludicrous. Like plasterboard houses in a hurricane. Your triumph is in perfect submission. And the god of Eros will flow through you, as Lawrence says, in the ’perfect obliteration of blood consciousness.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

280. “For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

281. “Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

282. “I wasn’t so special, honey. Except that I was your dad, I wasn’t so special.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

283. “It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

284. “Before I undertake a lengthy project, I have usually given much thought to it over a period of years. My files are filled with likely subjects – which perhaps, one day, I will develop.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

285. “To the young there are no degrees of old just as there are no degrees of dead – either you are, or you are not.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

286. “You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There’s a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can’t alter.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

287. “A diverse and lively collection, the highest art of the interview.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

288. “Was it confusing because it was artistic, or artistic because it was confusing?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

289. “Great handfuls of her life were being stolen from her and she would never be able to retrieve them.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

290. “In marriage, the most intense conversations are often with oneself.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

291. “What’ve I got to do, to prove how much I love you? Blow us all away?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

292. “Even if I seemed to remember, I could not know. For just to remember something is not to know if it really happened. That is a primary fact of the inner life, the most difficult fact with which we must live.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

293. “It struck her to the heart, left her weak, disoriented, that, to Michael Mulvaney, after all, his family wasn’t quite enough.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

294. “As if whoever it was held that camera was her closest friend. Or maybe it was the camera that was her closest friend.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

295. “Words are like wild birds – they will come when they wish, not when they are bidden.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

296. “Loving our parents, we bring them into us. They inhabit us. For a long time I believed that I could not bear to live without Mom and Dad – I could not bear to “outlive” them – for to be a daughter without parents did not seem possible to me.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

297. “Except that awards are competitive, which is a negative thing, they are wonderful for singling out deserving individuals and bringing their work to the attention of many potential readers who might otherwise have been totally unaware of them.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

298. “The standards for horror fiction should be no less than those for ‘serious literary’ fiction in which originality of concept, depth of characters, and attentiveness to language are vitally important.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

299. “The hard part of humanity is history. All that’s been done to human beings by other human beings. In the Rocky River Nature Preserve you didn’t have to think of such things.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

300. “Why the need, rising in some very nearly to the level of compulsion, to verify experience by way of language?-to scrupulously record and preserve the very passing of Time?”

— Joyce Carol Oates