Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

Read widely, and without apology. Read what you want to read, not what someone tells you you should read.

I had forgotten that time wasn't fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.

Writing is a consequence of having been 'haunted' by material. Why this is, no one knows.

Every scar in my face is worth it.

Death is just the last scene of the last act.

She wasn't in love but she would love him, if that would save her.

If I try to summon back his face, the sound of his voice, and the sensation in my stomach like a key turning in a lock when he touched me, I lose everything.

Running! If there's any activity happier, more exhilarating, more nourishing to the imagination, I can't think of what it might be. In running the mind flees with the body, the mysterious efflorescence of language seems to pulse in the brain, in rhythm with our feet and the swinging of our arms.

I have forced myself to begin writing when I've been utterly exhausted, when I've felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.

It makes me angry sometimes, it's a visceral thing — how you come to despise your own words in your ears not because they aren't genuine, but because they are; because you've said them so many times, your 'principles,' your 'ideals' — and so damned little in the world has changed because of them.

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

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

My self is all to me. I don't have any need of you.

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

"Erotic: meaning you're "desired."
For madness is seductive, sexy. Female madness.
So long as the female is reasonably young and attractive."