Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

American author (born 1938)

Add quote

Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American author who has published 58 novels, plays and novellas, as well as volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014 and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. She is a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley where she teaches short fiction.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Pen Names: Rosamond Smith • Lauren Kelly

From Wikidata (CC0)

Showing quotes in randomized order to avoid selection bias. Click Popular for most popular quotes.

I'm drawn to failure. I feel that I'm contending with it constantly in my own life.

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

Time is the enemy of lovers. Worse even than the frank light of day.

... her Quaker instincts led her to apologize for wrongs not her own to minimize conflict.

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

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

"What is "technique" but the absence of passion?"

Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.

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.

As if whoever it was held that camera was her closest friend. Or maybe it was the camera that was her closest friend.

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

Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.

The person you love best, you share the world with. When that person's gone the world remains but it isn't the same thing, it's at a distance.

When people say there is too much violence in [my books], what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.

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?