Top 450 Joyce Carol Oates Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

305. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

307. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

311. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

313. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

315. “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

316. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

318. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

320. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

322. “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

323. “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

324. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

327. “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

328. “Truths are the last thing you learn about your family. By the time you learn, you’re no longer their child.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

329. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

332. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

334. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

337. “Ideas brush past fleeting and insubstantial as moths. But I let them go, I don’t want them. What I want is a voice.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

338. “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

339. “Nothing comes of so many things, if you have patience.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

344. “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

345. “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

346. “While Annabel possessed the sylphid grace of a fairy-tale princess, unstudied and seemingly spontaneous, yet with a dreamy air, Willy presented a dramatic contrast: brash, brusque, heavy-jawed, with eyes that engaged too directly, and too often ironically. Willy’s considerable charm was at first obscured, to the superficial eye, by a certain stolidity in her figure, as in her character.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

347. “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

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

349. “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

350. “Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.”

— Joyce Carol Oates