110+ Joyce Carol Oates Quotes On Writing, Intense And Emotional

Joyce Carol Oates is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. She has published over 50 novels, as well as many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Oates is best known for her exploration of American social issues, particularly domestic violence, race, and class conflict. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Joyce Carol Oates on writing, intense, emotional.

Top 10 Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

1. Memory blurs, that's the point. If memory didn't blur you wouldn't have the fool's courage to do things again, again, again, that tear you apart.
2. Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.
3. Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.
4. Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.
5. See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be
6. I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.
7. Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be.
8. We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.
9. Look at the world and see what's there. It's very beautiful. It's a very exciting but in some ways treacherous world, and all this goes into the writing.
10. Self-criticism is an art not many are qualified to practice.

Joyce Carol Oates Short Quotes

• The mere passage of time makes us all exiles.
• The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.
• Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.
• To be knocked out doesn't mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.
• Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.
• The quiet people just do their work.
• My nature is orderly and observant and scrupulous and deeply introverted.
• Stories come to us as wraiths requiring precise embodiments.
• The best revenge is living well without you.
• Art is about freedom of expression, and should not be molded to fit any propaganda or lofty ideal.

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes About Writing

For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable. — Joyce Carol Oates

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space. — Joyce Carol Oates

It's very hard to be an experimental woman writer. If I had been writing under a pseudonym, just initials, I might have a different reputation - but, then I couldn't be myself either. — Joyce Carol Oates

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

I don't think that writer's block exists really. I think that when you're trying to do something prematurely, it just won't come. Certain subjects just need time, as I've learned over and over again. You've got to wait before you write about them. — Joyce Carol Oates

Without craft, art remains private. Without art, craft is merely hackwork. — Joyce Carol Oates

When poets - write about food it is usually celebratory. Food as the thing-in-itself, but also the thoughtful preparation of meals, the serving of meals, meals communally shared: a sense of the sacred in the profane. — Joyce Carol Oates

Writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy and freedom. — Joyce Carol Oates

The first sentence cant be written until the final sentence is written. — Joyce Carol Oates

And I’m drawn to failure. I often write about it, and I’m sympathetic with it, I think, because I feel I’m contending with it constantly in my own life. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes About Emotional

The secret of being a writer: not to expect others to value what you've done as you value it. Not to expect anyone else to perceive in it the emotions you have invested in it. Once this is understood, all will be well. — Joyce Carol Oates

Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind. — Joyce Carol Oates

The punishment – to the body, the brain, the spirit – a man must endure to become even a moderately good boxer is inconceivable to most of us whose idea of personal risk is largely ego-related or emotional. — Joyce Carol Oates

The institution of marriage is just formalizing an emotion, an attempt to make it seem permanent. The emotion will last or it won't last; nothing can guarantee it. — Joyce Carol Oates

My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes About Love

When you're 50 you start thinking about things you haven't thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity -- but actually it's about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. — Joyce Carol Oates

I used to think getting old was about vanity but actually it's about losing people you love. — Joyce Carol Oates

The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love. — Joyce Carol Oates

Maybe, love is always forgiveness, to a degree. — Joyce Carol Oates

Your punishment if you're a woman. Not loved enough. — Joyce Carol Oates

How mysterious it is, to be in love. For you can be in love with one who knows nothing of you. Perhpas our greatest happinesses spring from such longings-being in love with one who is oblivious of you. — Joyce Carol Oates

Her visits to her former hometown were infrequent and often painful. Pilgrimages fueled by the tepid oxygen of family duty, unease, guilt. The more Esther loved her parents, the more helpless she felt, as they aged, to protect them from harm. A moral coward, she kept her distance. — Joyce Carol Oates

Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate. — Joyce Carol Oates

In love there are two things - bodies and words. — Joyce Carol Oates

Impossible not to imagine the dead observing us. Our love for them a soft, shimmering gossamar that trails behind us. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes About Boxing

Boxing has become America's tragic theater. — Joyce Carol Oates

Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning. — Joyce Carol Oates

The third man in the ring makes boxing possible. — Joyce Carol Oates

Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost. — Joyce Carol Oates

Boxing is rough. Even if you win, you get hurt. — Joyce Carol Oates

Boxing is an American sport - a 'so-called sport' to many - in which images of incalculable beauty and violence, desperation and ingenuity, are routinely entwined; the sport that evokes the most extreme reactions - loathing, revulsion, righteous indigation; a fierce and often inexplicable loyalty. — Joyce Carol Oates

Life is like boxing in many unsettling respects. But boxing is only like boxing. — Joyce Carol Oates

To the west, the Pacific Ocean, which revulses me, for its vastness cannot be fitted into any box. — Joyce Carol Oates

In no other sport is the connection between performer and observer so intimate, so frequently painful, so unresolved — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes About Universe

Nothing is accidental in the universe - this is one of my Laws of Physics - except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity. — Joyce Carol Oates

Nothing is accidental in the universe -- this is one of my Laws of Physics -- except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity. — Joyce Carol Oates

Only when men are connected to large, universal goals are they really happy-and one result of their happiness is a rush of creative activity. — Joyce Carol Oates

The regional voice is the universal voice. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes About Entire

It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to write, however entirely different one's writing will be. — Joyce Carol Oates

It's rare that we actively and consciously 'forget'; most of the time we have simply forgotten, with no consciousness of having forgotten. In individuals, the phenomenon is called 'denial'; in entire cultures and nations, it's usually called 'history. — Joyce Carol Oates

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people. — Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Famous Quotes And Sayings

If you explore beneath shyness or party chit-chat, you can sometimes turn a dull exchange into an intriguing one. I've found this to be particularly true in the case of professors or intellectuals, who are full of fascinating information, but need encouragement before they'll divulge it. — Joyce Carol Oates

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices. — Joyce Carol Oates

The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable. — Joyce Carol Oates

There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it. — Joyce Carol Oates

Budapest in late May is a city of lilacs. The sweet, languid, rather sleepy smell of lilacs wafts everywhere. And it is a city of lovers, many of them quite middle-aged. Walking with their arms around each other, embracing and kissing on park benches. A sensuousness very much bound up (it seems to me) with the heady ubiquitous smell of lilacs. — Joyce Carol Oates

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

It is only through disruptions and confusion that we grow, jarred out of ourselves by the collision of someone else's private world with our own. — Joyce Carol Oates

Art is fueled by rebellion: the need, in some amounting to obsessions, to resist what is, to defy one's elders, even to the point of ostracism; to define oneself, and by extension one's generation, as new, novel, ungovernable. — Joyce Carol Oates

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

The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole. — Joyce Carol Oates

We inhabit ourselves without valuing ourselves, unable to see that here, now, this very moment is sacred; but once it’s gone – its value is incontestable. — Joyce Carol Oates

you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself. — Joyce Carol Oates

...failure is a human condition, not victory over odds; for each Hellen Keller who triumphs, there are tens of millions who fail, mute and deaf and insensate as vegetables tossed upon a vast garbage pile to rot. — Joyce Carol Oates

For memory is a moral action, a choice. You can choose to remember. You can choose not. — Joyce Carol Oates

Flying fosters fantasies of childhood, of omnipotence, rapid shifts of being, miraculous moments; it stirs our capacity for dreaming. — Joyce Carol Oates

I am the presence standing here at this juncture of Time & Space- who else? — Joyce Carol Oates

Great art is cathartic; it is always moral. — Joyce Carol Oates

Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art. — Joyce Carol Oates

Her wish to die was as pervasive as a dial tone: you lift the receiver, it's always there. — Joyce Carol Oates

A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court. — Joyce Carol Oates

Each genre exerts a considerable spell, as a kind of "form" to be filled, as a Shakespearean sonnet is filled. — Joyce Carol Oates

Prose-it might be speculated-is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider's delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds. — Joyce Carol Oates

There is something thrilling in the mimesis of life's surprising unfolding. — Joyce Carol Oates

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to "overcome" doubt. — Joyce Carol Oates

Of the widow's countless death-duties there is really just one that matters: on the first anniversary of her husband's death the widow should think I kept myself alive. — Joyce Carol Oates

There is a terrible weight in all kinds of beauty — Joyce Carol Oates

The only people who claim that money is not important are people who have enough money so that they are relieved of the ugly burden of thinking about it. — Joyce Carol Oates

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

[Emily] Dickinson, our supreme poet of inwardness. — Joyce Carol Oates

Perhaps the inevitable tragedy of our complex civilization is that we must be specialists in our fields - and our fields have become increasingly difficult, so that communication is nearly impossible. — Joyce Carol Oates

My life is a very interior and solitary life. I tend not to care that much about external things. — Joyce Carol Oates

I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I've written. — Joyce Carol Oates

Near the point of impact, time acelerates to the speed of light. — Joyce Carol Oates

I believe that any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression. ... Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it. The more original and unsettling their art, the more devastating the punishment. — Joyce Carol Oates

Self-criticism, like self-administered brain surgery, is perhaps not a good idea. Can the 'self' see the 'self' with any objectivity? — Joyce Carol Oates

I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called 'culture' - and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species. — Joyce Carol Oates

How fascinating to a child are words: the shapes, sounds, textures and mysterious meanings of words; the way words link together into elastic patterns called "sentences." And these sentences into paragraphs, and beyond. — Joyce Carol Oates

And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs. — Joyce Carol Oates

Much of my writing is energized by unresolved memories - something like ghosts in the psychological sense. — Joyce Carol Oates

Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day. — Joyce Carol Oates

Betrayal is the deepest wound. Betrayal is what remains of love, when love has gone. — Joyce Carol Oates

Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows. — Joyce Carol Oates

Writing allows for fictitious voices - the voices of persons unlike myself - that might otherwise be muted. — Joyce Carol Oates

One of the large consolations for experiencing anything unpleasant is the knowledge that one can communicate it. — Joyce Carol Oates

The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn't there something reassuring about it! -- that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another's eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms -- nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss? — Joyce Carol Oates

A diverse and lively collection, the highest art of the interview. — Joyce Carol Oates

I've always been so interested in personal history. I'm very fascinated by my parents' and my grandparents' generations. I seem to think that they had a resilience and an integrity that may be somewhat deficient in my own generation, and in subsequent generations as well, because America has been rather easy to live in since the Depression. — Joyce Carol Oates

Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates. — Joyce Carol Oates

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

Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending. — Joyce Carol Oates

the art of reading hardly differs from the art of writing, in that its most intense pleasures and pains must remains private, and cannot be communicated to others. — Joyce Carol Oates

The brain is a muscle of busy hills, the struggle of unthought things with things eternally thought. — Joyce Carol Oates

Whoever's reading this, if anyone is reading it: does it matter that our old selves are lost to us as surely as the past is lost, or is it enough to know yes we lived then, and we are living now, and the connection must be there? Like a river hundreds of miles long exists both at its source and at its mouth, simultaneously? — Joyce Carol Oates

One of the qualities of writing that is not much stressed is its problem-solving aspect, having to do with the presentation of material: how to structure it, what sort of sentences (direct, elliptical, simple or compound, syntactically elaborate), what tone (in art, "tone" is everything), pacing. Paragraphing is a way of dramatization, as the look of a poem on a page is dramatic; where to break lines, where to end sentences. — Joyce Carol Oates

Not to be alone. To be spared the possibility of knowing oneself, in aloneness. — Joyce Carol Oates

It would be difficult for a writer of realism to avoid suggesting a political/moral perspective in his or her fiction. "Politics" per se is absent from my writing but there is usually a moral (if ironic) compass. — Joyce Carol Oates

I am more or less reading all the time. — Joyce Carol Oates

Yet the fact had no consciousness of itself except through me. — Joyce Carol Oates

I don't know whether I am different from other people. Perhaps I am. Perhaps no one has a personality, and people are inventing themselves in the context in which they find themselves. — Joyce Carol Oates

Because the meaning of a story does not lie on its surface, visible and self-defining, does not mean that meaning does not exist. Indeed, the ambiguity of meaning, its inner private quality, may well be part of the writer's vision. — Joyce Carol Oates

How lovely this world is, really: one simply has to look. — Joyce Carol Oates

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, numerous others, will say it for you. — Joyce Carol Oates

Why is humanism not the preeminent belief of humankind? — Joyce Carol Oates

Life Lessons by Joyce Carol Oates

1. Joyce Carol Oates emphasizes the importance of perseverance and hard work, encouraging readers to never give up in the face of adversity.
2. She encourages readers to take risks and to be open to new experiences and ideas, as well as to never be afraid of failure.
3. Oates also emphasizes the importance of self-reflection and understanding one's own emotions, as well as the importance of compassion and empathy for others.