Explore Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of 'working' at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of the word.

For some reason, voters can be brainwashed, and they vote sometimes against their own best interests, let alone voting against the interests of people who need them, like people who are disenfranchised and people who are poor and so forth.

Criticism is, for me, like essay writing, a wonderful way of relaxation; it doesn't require a heightened and mediated voice, like prose fiction, but rather a calm, rational, even conversational voice.

As a farm girl, even when I was quite young, I had my 'farm chores' - but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.

Among many of my friends and acquaintances, I seem to be one of the very few individuals who felt or feels no ambivalence about my mother. All my feelings for my mother were positive, very strong and abiding.

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.

A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.'

After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.

'A Fair Maiden' existed in notes and sketches for perhaps a year. When I traveled, I would take along with me my folder of notes - 'ideas for stories.' Eventually, I began to write it and wrote it fairly swiftly - in perhaps two months of fairly intense writing and rewriting. Most of my time writing is really re-writing.

After my husband died, I could not write much - I could not concentrate. I was too exhausted most of the time even to contemplate writing. But I did take notes - not for fiction, but for a journal, or diary, of this terrible time. I did not think that I would ever survive this interlude.

A lot of widows feel that they have betrayed their spouse by continuing to live. It's deranged thinking. I know that, but that doesn't stop you feeling it.

Except that awards are competitive, which is a negative thing, they are wonderful for singling out deserving individuals and bringing their work to the attention of many potential readers who might otherwise have been totally unaware of them.

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

To be Jewish is to be specifically identified with a history. And if you're not aware of that when you're a child, the whole tradition is lost.

Productivity is a relative matter. And it's really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer's strongest books.

The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.

The - the sort of thing that I want to do is to strike a resonant chord of universality in other people, which is best done by fiction.

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

We are stimulated to emotional response, not by works that confirm our sense of the world, but by works that challenge it.

The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.

Our enemy is by tradition our savior, in preventing us from superficiality.