Top 15 Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

I never change, I simply become more myself.

Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another's skin, another's voice, another's soul.

The best revenge is living well without you.

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

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

The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be

In love there are two things - bodies and words.

A daydreamer is prepared for most things.

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

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.

Keep a light, hopeful heart. But ­expect the worst.

And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.

"There is an hour, a minute - you will remember it forever - when you know instinctively on the basis of the most inconsequential evidence, that something is wrong. You don't know - can't know - that it is the first of a series of "wrongful" events that will culminate in the utter devastation of your life as you have known it."

"Keeing busy" is the remedy for all the ills in America. It's also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.