Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

I feel very transparent in myself. I’m more of an observer. I’m interested in what’s going on. I’m not sure that I really have a personality. Some people think I do have a personality. I have a personality when I am with certain people — but when I’m not with them I don’t have that personality. I just sort of go back to resembling a transparent glass of water.

Of our hurts we make monuments of survival. If we survive.

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

the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.

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

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

A mouth of no distinction but well practiced, before I entered my teens, in irony. For what is irony but the repository of hurt? And what is hurt but the repository of hope?

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.

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.

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

Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.

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.

Marianne laughed. But you can’t disappoint me! I don’t love you.

"Hating "The Great Gatsby" (the novel) is like spitting into the Grand Canyon. It will not be going away anytime soon, but you will be."

Adriana loved even the rank animal smell of the man's body, her sweat-slicked breasts and belly flattened beneath him, and her arms and legs clutching him as a drowning woman might clutch another person to save her life. Don't don't don't don't leave me. DON'T LEAVE ME. As in animal copulation the frenzy is to be locked together not out of sentiment or choice but physical compulsion. As if bolts of electric current ran through both their bodies and would only release them from each other when it ceased.