Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.

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

I’ve never thought of writing as the mere arrangement of words on the page but the attempted embodiment of a vision; a complex of emotions; raw experience. The effort of memorable art is to evoke in the reader or spectator emotions appropriate to that effort.

Unbidden, Unwelcome, Yet unable to resist, I entered a stranger's life

What madness! Yet she would do it, if she could force herself. She'd become, she believed, a stronger person: a willful, resolute. Like the man who adored her, reckless.

Acting is the loneliest profession I know.

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.

I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.

If I’m required to identify myself on a form, I write “teacher.” I’ve been a teacher almost as long as I’ve been writing. [Pause.] I think of myself less as a writer than as a person who writes — or tries to. Each morning is a kind of obstacle course in which the obstacles seem to have all the advantage.

The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.

Close up she saw that Molina's eyes were beautiful and dark thik eye lashed the way Lisette's mother tried to make hers with a mascara brush. The skin beneath Molina's eyes were soft and bruised looking and on her throat were tiny dark moles. It did not seem right that a woman like Molina, who you could tell was a mother-her body was a mother's body for sure, wide hips-could be a cop;it did not seem right that this person was carrying a gun, in a holster attached to leather belt, and that she could use it, if she wanted to.

Men grow cold as girls grow old
And we all lose our charms in the end.

How prettily Lorelei Lee sang these mordant lyrics!

That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.

I think that art is the commemoration of life in its variety. The novel, for instance, is “historic” in its embodiment in a specific place and time and its suggestion that there is meaning to our actions. Without the stillness, thoughtfulness and depths of art, and without the ceaseless moral rigors of art, we would have no shared culture — no collective memory. As it is, in contemporary societies, where so much concentration is focused on social media, insatiable in its myriad, fleeting interests, the “stillness and thoughtfulness” of a more permanent art feels threatened.

Did you know, Marianne: how by breaking the code that day, you broke it forever? For us all?