Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

A hero can be fool, he's still a hero.

As if whoever it was held that camera was her closest friend. Or maybe it was the camera that was her closest friend.

A man will reveal his true self, or so it seems, on the tennis court.

The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his efforts, he believes in the future.

That glass sliver in the heart. Amid a fluttery-delicious Benzedrine rush, virtually every remark made to you is freighted with destiny, a sweet-painful stab in the heart. And Benzedrine and champagne, what a combination! The Blond Actress was only just discovering what everybody else in Hollywood knew.

Relief is happiness for those who, otherwise, would have no happiness.

"The dilemma is, in the United States, each penniless citizen believes that, with luck, he might become a millionaire; and so doesn't want to put restraints on "robber barons"-he might become one one day!"

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.

Since thirteen, she’d been preparing. She wasn’t beautiful like these Bayhead Harbor girls, but it was surprising how men sometimes looked at her. More it was older men rather than guys her age, for some reason. […] There were guys - older guys - she’d yearned for so frankly you could see it in her face.

For, in movie logic, aesthetics has the authority of ethics: to be less than beautiful is sad, but to be willfully less than beautiful is immoral.

....whatever you do, with whom you do it or whether you do it alone, and when, and how, and why, to what mysterious end — it's balanced against nothing, against Death and forgetting. You balanced against oblivion.

I always instruct my students to write a great deal. Write a journal. Take notes. Write when you are feeling wretched, when your mind is about to break down...who knows what will float up to the surface? I am an unashamed believer in the magical powers of dreams; dreams enhance us. Even nightmares may be marketable — there is something to be said for the conscious, calculating exorcism of nightmares, if they give to us such works as those of Dostoyevsky, Celine,and Kafka. So the most important thing is to write, and to write nearly every day, in sickness and in health. In a while, in a few weeks or a few years, you can always make sense of that jumble of impressions...or perhaps it will suddenly reveal its sense to you.

"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.

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.

Loretta folded her arms. She felt like a heroine in a movie, confronted by a jealous husband in a kitchen while outside the camera is aching to draw back and show a wonderland of adventures waiting for her — long, frantic rides on trains, landscapes of wounded soldiers, a lovely white desert across which a camel caravan draped voluptuously in veils moves slowly with a kind of mincing melancholy, the steamy jungles of India opening before British officers in white, young officers, the mysteries of English drawing-rooms cracking before the quick, humorless smirk of a wise young woman from America. . . .