Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

For obviously the advantage for most writers is that no one sees them. The writer is invisible, which confers power.

The challenge is to resist circumstances. Any idiot can be happy in a happy place, but moral courage is required to be happy in a hellhole.

What does it mean to be born? After we die, will it be the same thing as it was before we were born? Or a different kind of nothingness? Because there might be knowledge then. Memory.

I'm Legs Sadovsky I'm FOXFIRE I don't fuck around with guys.

There is something female about being dead.

Because nothing between human beings is uncomplicated and there's no way to speak of human beings without simplifying and misrepresenting them.

Yet I will make you all love me and I will punish myself to spite your love.

Cherie, keep walking. Shut your eyes. We are headed for the bridge. We are going to cross it.

"My dis-interest in what people speak of as "women's problems," "women's literature." Have women a special sensibility? No. There are individuals uniquely talented & uniquely equipped to interpret the complex symbolism of the world but they are certainly not determined by gender. The very idea is astonishing. [...] Energy, talent, vision, insight, compassion, the ability to stay with a single work for long periods of time, the ability to be faithful (to both one's writing and one's beloved) — these have nothing to do with gender. [...] The sensibility of a Virginia Woolf, for instance. It's her own, it's uniquely hers. Not because she is a "female" but because she is, or was, Virginia Woolf. Not more sensitive than Henry James or Proust or James Joyce, consequently not more "feminine" in the narrow & misleading sense people use that term today....But then I suppose critics must have something to write about. [...]"

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’.

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.

"And that's the insult of it, how always it comes back to a woman being a "good" mother in the world's eyes or a "bad" mother, how everything in a woman's life is funneled through her body between her legs."

This was before voice mail, recorded phone messages you can't escape. Life was easier then. You just didn't pick up the phone.

From Mother you will inherit the belief that you can journey to your fate, there's a place to be located on a map that's destiny. If only you can get there. If it isn't too late. If no one stops you.

That's how a thing starts out real then ends up just an idea.