Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

I'm sure all that you've heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.

I'm nobody's daughter now. I'm through with that.

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.

We are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

Lawrence is the supreme poet of Eros. No recriminations, no reproaches, no guilt, no 'morality'. For what's 'morality' but a leash around the neck? A noose? What's 'morality' but what other people want you to do, for their own, selfish, unstated purposes?

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.

I tell my students to write of their true subjects. How will they know when they are writing of their true subjects? By the ease with which they write. By their reluctance to stop writing. By the headachy, even guilty, joyous sensation of having done something that must be done, having confessed emotions thought unconfessable, having said what had seemed should remain unsaid. If writing is difficult, stop writing. Begin again with another subject. The true subject writes itself, it cannot be silenced. Give shape to your dreams, your day-dreams, cultivate your day-dreams and their secret meanings will come out.

Alone,alone! It is a fact, you hear more acutely and you see and think most acutely,when you are alone.
Alone, alone! But there is happiness in alone, if you believe you have chosen it.

Every scar in my face is worth it.

It's one of those secrets that's embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students.

How crucial for us to rehearse the future, in words.

Never to doubt that you will live to utter them.

Never to doubt that you will tell your story.

Only in love is there trust - even the possibility of trust.

"Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily,often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul" — Joyce Carole Oates

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

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.