Top 450 Joyce Carol Oates Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Words are like wild birds – they will come when they wish, not when they are bidden.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

303. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

305. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

307. “There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You’re dead, yet alive. There’s no sensation so exquisite.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

309. “Love is what can’t be helped. When it waxes, and when it wanes. Love is what happens when you’ve been looking another way. Love is that sensation of something on the back of your neck, tell yourself it’s nothing, a strand of hair, at last you touch it and discover it’s an insect – you cast off with a curse.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

312. “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

313. “The aim of theater – Aristotle said it first, and Aristotle said it best – is to arouse profound emotion in the spectator and through this arousal to effect a catharsis of the soul. If there’s.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

315. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

317. “He had no idea of my misery. It would have surprised him to think that I was a human creature with a soul.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

318. “Nor do I like being told upsetting news – unless there is a good reason. I can’t help but feel that there is an element of cruelty, if not sadism, in friends telling one another upsetting things for no reason except to observe their reactions.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

319. “I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

320. “All prices of all things – at least, useless beautiful things like rare books – are inherently absurd, rooted in the human imagination and in the all-too-human predilection to desperately want what others value highly, and to scorn what others fail to value.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

321. “The fundamental truth of my life whether in fact it was truth or a burlesque of truth: when a man wants you, you’re safe.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

322. “To love life for some men is to love fighting, for fighting, and not love, is seen as man’s deepest passion.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

323. “I think we are all cats with nine lives, or even more. We must rejoice in our elusive catness.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

324. “Once upon a time the fairy tales begin. But then they end and often you don’t know really what has happened, what was meant to happen, you only know what you’ve been told, what the words suggest.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

325. “Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn’t require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

326. “Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

327. “Writing is the most solitary of arts.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

328. “The body can’t distinguish between cleansing and punishing for the body is ignorant, and mute besides.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

329. “Then the noise faded and Legs squinted up at the sky, the moon so bright you’d never think it could be merely rock like the earth’s common rock and lifeless, merely reflected light from an invisible sun and not a powerful living light of its own...”

— Joyce Carol Oates

330. “If I’m writing, I’ll say something metaphorical or approximate, whereas scientists are very precise.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

331. “There could be no romance in the terrible possibility that Gretel Nissenbaum had fled on foot, alone, not to her family but simply to escape from her life; in what exigency of need, what despondency of spirit, no name might be given it by any who have not experienced it.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

332. “The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

333. “Early publication can be a dubious blessing: we all know writers who would give anything not to have published their first book, and go about trying to buy up all existing copies.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

334. “Were you wounded when your marriage collapsed? When your love collapsed? Or does love never “collapse,” only just fade gradually away?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

335. “Legs was always proud even before FOXFIRE, that’s the primary fact about Legs Sadovsky: pride.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

336. “It is required that we must be fiercely beloved by one individual in order to exist: for Sabbath, Haley was that individual.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

337. “You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

338. “We never have time, do we, for all that we don’t exactly want to do.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

339. “I will be the clinician of my own pathology.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

340. “Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

341. “Dorie herself was not very surprised, because a daydreamer is prepared for most things and in a way she had planned even this, though she had not guessed how it would come about.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

342. “Messes are made by people who want but don’t know what they want, let alone how to get it.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

343. “Still, I am angry with him. I am very angry with him. With my poor dead defenseless husband, I am furious as I was rarely – perhaps never – furious with him, in life. How can I forgive you, you’ve ruined both our lives.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

344. “I can’t say I was a very successful sorority girl.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

345. “That I was sleeping at a time when my husband was dying is so horrible a thought, I can’t confront it.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

346. “Loving Felix she’d acquired from him a certain arrogance, telling so many lies she’d acquired a zest for lies and quite preferred them to the truth. For a lie had to be invented, “truth” was common property.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

347. “I am thinking of having a T-shirt printed: Yes my husband died. Yes I am very sad. Yes you are kind to offer condolences. Now can we change the subject?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

348. “He said no break is permanent. Like a bone that heals crooked, still it will heal.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

349. “At such rare times you can feel the electrically charged neurons of the prefrontal brain realigning themselves like iron fillings drawn by a magnet.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

350. “This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can’t escape. Life was easier then. You just didn’t pick up the phone.”

— Joyce Carol Oates