Explore Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

you're an insomniac, you tell yourself: there are profound truths revealed only to the insomniac by night like those phosphorescent minerals veined and glimmering in the dark but coarse and ordinary otherwise; you have to examine such minerals in the absence of light to discover their beauty, you tell yourself.

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

Every scar in my face is worth it.

The written word, obviously, is very inward, and when we're reading, we're thinking. It's a sort of spiritual, meditative activity. When we're looking at visual objects, I think our eyes are obviously directed outward, so there's not as much reflective time. And it's the reflectiveness and the spiritual inwardness about reading that appeals to me.

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

The greatest realities are physical and economic, all the subtleties of life come afterward.

If you explore beneath shyness or party chit-chat, you can sometimes turn a dull exchange into an intriguing one. I've found this to be particularly true in the case of professors or intellectuals, who are full of fascinating information, but need encouragement before they'll divulge it.

Never be ashamed of your subject, and of your passion for your subject.

The novel is the affliction for which only the novel is the cure.

You are writing for your contemporaries - not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your contemporaries will become Posterity.

The despairing soul is a rebel.

The innocence of such children doesn't answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret to family life.

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

What is a family, after all, except memories? Haphazard and precious as the contents of a catch-all drawer in the kitchen.

Technique holds a reader from sentence to sentence, but only content will stay in his mind.

Be your own editor/critic. Sympathetic but merciless!

Ambitious, absorbing, and poignantly moving.

I have beliefs, of course, like everyone-but I don't always believe in them.

Literature, art, like civilization itself, are only accidents.

It must happen to everyone. The last time you make love, you can't know it will be the last.

She thought that this man was her savior, that he had come to her at a time in her life when her life demanded completion, an end, a permanent fixing of all that was troubled and shifting and deadly. And yet it was absurd to think this. No person could save another. So she drew back from him and released him.