Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

Society is the picnic certain individuals leave early, the party they fail to enjoy, the musical comedy they find not worth the price of admission.

"The distinction between "assistant" and intern" is a simple one: assistants are paid, interns are not.

But of course interns are paid, in experience.

Any number of definitions help to determine who we are. It doesn't hurt to be a woman writer, an American woman writer, American woman writer of the 21st century. I think all these descriptions of us — and they're descriptions and adjectives that pertain to you — none of them diminish you, really. I think that maybe there's a kind of deepening or expansion the more identifications you have.

"Erotic: meaning you're "desired."
For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness.
So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive."

At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it.

My theory is that literature is essential to society in the way that dreams are essential to our lives. We can’t live without dreaming — as we can’t live without sleep. We are “conscious” beings for only a limited period of time, then we sink back into sleep — the “unconscious.” It is nourishing, in ways we can’t fully understand.

There is an hour when you realize: here is what you have been given. More than this, you won't receive. And what this is, what your life has come to, will be taken from you. In time.

Oh, we women know things you don't know, you teachers, you readers and writers of books, we are the ones who wait around libraries when it's time to leave, or sit drinking coffee alone in the kitchen; we make crazy plans for marriage but have no man, we dream of stealing men, we are the ones who look slowly around when we get off a bus and can't even find what we are looking for, can't quite remember how we got there, we are always wondering what will come next, what terrible thing will come next. We are the ones who leaf through magazines with colored pictures and spend long heavy hours sunk in our bodies, thinking, remembering, dreaming, waiting for something to come to us and give a shape to so much pain.

Loneliness is like starvation: you don't realize how hungry you are until you begin to eat.

It feels good, honey, but it isn't love.

To the young there are no degrees of old just as there are no degrees of dead - either you are, or you are not.

... while madness in individuals is relatively rare, it is virtually a prerequisite for a certain sort of political leader.

For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?

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?

...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.