Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

Writers and artists never pay attention to advice given by their elders, quite rightly. The only worthwhile advice is the most general: Keep trying, don’t give up, don’t be discouraged, don’t pay attention to detractors. Everyone knows this.

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

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

"P.J. said, "That's true about any statement we make, isn't it? We never tell as much as we know."
"Right! So We're lying. So almost every statement is a lie, we can't help it."
"Yeah. But some statements are more lies than others.

Writing! The activity for which the only adequate bribe is the possibility of suicide, one day.

A daydreamer is prepared for most things.

In that way you recall, suddenly, sharply, in daylight, a trace of a dream of the previous night — but even as you recall it, it begins to fade.

You wake up one morning, those years are gone. There's a comfort in this fact perhaps. I want to think that there must be comfort in all facts we can't alter.

Like a turnip such a head could be blown away very easily. For where a man was weak, a woman has unmanned him. It would be a mercy to blow such a man away.

He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesn't matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her 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.

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.

Be daring, take on anything. Don’t labor over little cameo works in which every word is to be perfect. Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.

The theme of invisibility has haunted me for many years, since earliest girlhood. A woman often feels ‘invisible’ in a public sense precisely because her physical being - her ‘visibility’ - figures so prominently in her identity. She is judged as a body, she is ‘attractive’ or ‘unattractive’, while knowing that her deepest self is inward, and secret: knowing, hoping that her spiritual essence is a great deal more complex than the casual eye of the observer will allow… it might be argued that all persons, defined to themselves rather more as what they think and dream than what they do, are ‘invisible’.

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