Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

American author (born 1938)

Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is an American author who has published 58 novels, plays and novellas, as well as volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Oates taught at Princeton University from 1978 to 2014 and is the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing. She is a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley where she teaches short fiction.

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Pen Names: Rosamond Smith • Lauren Kelly

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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.

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.

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.

The writer is a “somewhat mystical” — or do I mean “mythical”? — person.

Any kind of creative activity is likely to be stressful. The more anxiety, the more you feel that you are headed in the right direction. Easiness, relaxation, comfort — these are not conditions that usually accompany serious work.

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.

We all have numerous identities that shift with circumstances. The writing self is likely to be a highly private, conjured sort of being — you would not find it in a grocery store.

At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it.

There is the expectation that a younger generation has the opportunity to redeem the crimes and failings of their elders and would have the strength and idealism to do so.

Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.

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

Any number of definitions help to determine who we are. It doesn't hurt to be a woman writer, an American woman writer, American woman writer of the 21st century. I think all these descriptions of us — and they're descriptions and adjectives that pertain to you — none of them diminish you, really. I think that maybe there's a kind of deepening or expansion the more identifications you have.

[The] third man in the ring makes boxing possible.

To be knocked out doesn’t mean what it seems. A boxer does not have to get up.

Boxing has become America’s tragic theater.