Top 450 Joyce Carol Oates Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

252. “To be true to life, a novel must have an ending that is inevitable given the specific personalities of the characters involved. The novelist must not impose an ending upon them.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

253. “THANK YOU but please do not write again. And do not call. I have had enough of you.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

254. “Paradox: how do we know what we have failed to see because we have no language to express it, thus we cannot know that we have failed to see it.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

255. “When you give up struggle, there’s a kind of love.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

256. “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

257. “The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

258. “I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

259. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

262. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

265. “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

266. “Like editing, gardening requires infinite patience; it requires an essential selflessness, and optimism.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

269. “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

270. “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

271. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

275. “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

276. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

279. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

282. “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

283. “Maybe, love is always forgiveness, to a degree.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

284. “I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I’ve written.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

285. “A jury is as bright as the dumbest member of the jury.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

286. “Among many of my friends and acquaintances, I seem to be one of the very few individuals who felt or feels no ambivalence about my mother. All my feelings for my mother were positive, very strong and abiding.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

287. “My self is all to me. I don’t have any need of you.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

288. “At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There’s something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

289. “As our great American philosopher William James has said, an individual has as many selves as there are individuals whom he knows. There isn’t the slightest hypocrisy in this, but only pragmatic ethics. For not all persons are worthy of our acquaintance, and not all persons require equal time from us. You save your most valuable ‘personality’ for the most valuable persons you know.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

292. “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

293. “You are writing for your contemporaries – not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates