Top 450 Joyce Carol Oates Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 8 of 10

351. “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

352. “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

353. “But this controversy did not involve the corporal who refused to give thought to what his life had become as a case. God did not think of a man as a case. For a case is to be solved – and a man cannot be solved.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

354. “It is a terrible thing to feel that you might break down, you might utter a confession that could not then be retrieved.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

355. “I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they don’t have ordinarily.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

356. “When a marriage ends, who is left to understand it?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

357. “NO KISS FORGOTTEN; it resides in the memory as in the flesh, and so Katya many times felt the press of Marcus Kidder’s warm mouth on hers in the days and especially in the nights following. And her heartbeat quickened in protest: How could you! Kiss him! That old man! Kiss him! Let him put his arms around you ad kiss you and kiss him back! The old man’s mouth and Katya Spivak’s mouth! How could you.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

358. “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

359. “That glass sliver in the heart. Amid a fluttery-delicious Benzedrine rush, virtually every remark made to you is freighted with destiny, a sweet-painful stab in the heart. And Benzedrine and champagne, what a combination! The Blond Actress was only just discovering what everybody else in Hollywood knew.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

360. “Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories – something like ghosts in the psychological sense.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

361. “Secrets have always been easy for me, it’s the opposite of secrets that is hard.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

362. “The gym cat appears to those who will die. He is our totem.” This thought came to me a few weeks ago. I shared it with no one of course.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

363. “A writer who has published as many books as I have has developed, of necessity, a hide like a rhino’s, while inside there dwells a frail, hopeful butterfly of a spirit.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

364. “On the way home Mary Lou said, “Some things are so sad you can’t say them.” But I pretended not to hear.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

365. “Willy was more forceful, as Annabel seemed to glide;.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

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

— Joyce Carol Oates

367. “She was there beside him, an incalculable distance away.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

368. “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

369. “I think whenever we think of our hometowns, we tend to think of very specific people: with whom you rode on the school bus, who was your next door neighbor you were playing with, who your girlfriend was. It’s always something very specific.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

370. “The act of sending a letter is an act of generosity, even if, in retrospect, it might seem reckless. Why regret one’s generosity? Why regret one’s impulsiveness, one’s misjudgment of others? The inevitable discovery that someone is selling letters you’d written in trust is simply to discover an obvious human truth: there are those who don’t cherish us as we’d cherished them, and had wished to be cherished by them.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

371. “They were astronomers plotting the trajectories of stars.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

372. “An actress wants to be seen. An actress wants to be loved. By multitudes of people, not just one lone man.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

373. “Maybe he’d been mistaken, trying so hard to make his wife and young children happy. Maybe it’s always a mistake, trying to assure the happiness of others.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

374. “Popular! In America, what else matters?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

375. “Of all miracles, none is more daunting than normal. To be – to become – normal. This gift seemingly so ordinary is not a gift given to all who seek it.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

376. “If Hannah knew where he was! – frankly eyeing a hatcheck girl his faughter Geraldine’s age, noting her legs in black patterned stockings, her feet in black stiletto-heeled shoes, feeling the first dim stirrings of desire so faint and so sad it was like hearing a telephone ringing and ringing in a distant room you couldn’t hope to get to and if you did the call wouldn’t be for you.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

377. “You love the life you’ve lived because it is yours.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

378. “I know that there are many essential biological differences between the sexes, of course. But not so many ‘culturally-mandated’ differences. In First World countries we’ve evolved beyond mere biology -it isn’t the fate of the human female to be pregnant continously until she wears out and dies.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

379. “To claim – to claim repeatedly – that you are innocent of what it is claimed by others that you have done, or might have done, or are in some quarters strongly suspected of having done, is never enough unless others, numberous others, will say it for you.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

380. “It’s one of those secrets that’s embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

381. “On their own, your eyes did not naturally discover the sky.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

382. “Knowing now I would never be alone again never lonely again as in those years God allowed me to be thus as if He did not exist forcing onto me the bitter knowledge that He did not exist in truth or if He did His existence touched in no way upon my own.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

383. “And I like your laugh, Sabbath; it’s inaudible.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

384. “It was hard not to exude the air of a martyr, if one did just slightly more than the other, as it seemed Mickey frequently did.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

385. “Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

386. “How strange it is, to be walking away. Is it possible that I am really going to leave Ray – here? Is it possible that he won’t be coming home with me in another day or two, as we’d planned? Such a thought is too profound for me to grasp. It’s like fitting a large unwieldy object in a small space. My brain hurts, trying to contain it.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

387. “Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn’t have the personality of a politician. We don’t see the world that simply.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

388. “Like the philosophy credited to Jack Dempsey: The more punches a man takes, the closer he is to the end. Because a man has only a fixed number of punches he can take in his lifetime. “Pa?”

— Joyce Carol Oates

389. “And the thought consoled me, as it does now: everything you believe you have imagined is real. You have only to outlive it.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

390. “People might be surprised to know how much I throw away. For every page I publish, I throw 10 pages away.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

391. “I have read on a Kindle. But the Kindle we had only worked for about eight months then it stopped working. You don’t have to get books repaired.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

392. “I’d like to be your friend – but only if you promise not to ever, ever count on me.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

393. “Fiction that adds up, that suggests a “logical consistency,” or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

394. “The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!”

— Joyce Carol Oates

395. “Yet the fact had no consciousness of itself except through me.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

396. “Acting is the loneliest profession I know.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

397. “But he doesn’t love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love – the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesn’t happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one another’s faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesn’t happen.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

398. “Three days later on October 29, 1959, the Pontiac registered in the name of Niles Tignor would be discovered, gas tank near-empty, keys on the floorboards beneath the front seat, in a parking lot close by the Greyhound bus station in Rome, New York.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

399. “I would know of myself through the witnessing and naming of others. As Jesus in the Gospels is only seen and spoken of and recorded by others. I would know my existence and the value of that existence through others’ eyes, which I believed I could trust as I could not trust my own.”

— Joyce Carol Oates

400. “For, in movie logic, aesthetics has the authority of ethics: to be less than beautiful is sad, but to be willfully less than beautiful is immoral.”

— Joyce Carol Oates