Joyce Carol Oates Quotes (89 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Joyce Carol Oates interviews herself (2013)
Context: 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.

“When people say there is too much violence in [my books], what they are saying is there is too much reality in life.”

Joyce Carol Oates

New York Times (27 July 1980)

Joyce Carol Oates: Trending quotes

“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.”

Joyce Carol Oates

New York Times (27 July 1980)

“I never change, I simply become more myself.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Source: Solstice

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

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

“Prose — it might be speculated — is discourse; poetry ellipsis.”

Joyce Carol Oates

"'Soul at the White Heat': The Romance of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry," (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities (1988)
Context: Prose — it might be speculated — is discourse; poetry ellipsis. Prose is spoken aloud; poetry overheard. The one is presumably articulate and social, a shared language, the voice of "communication"; the other is private, allusive, teasing, sly, idiosyncratic as the spider’s delicate web, a kind of witchcraft unfathomable to ordinary minds.

“My theory is that literature is essential to society in the way that dreams are essential to our lives.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates interviews herself (2013)
Context: 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.

“We all have numerous identities that shift with circumstances.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates interviews herself (2013)
Context: 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.

“The best revenge is living well without you.”

Joyce Carol Oates

“The worst thing: to give yourself away in exchange for not enough love.”

Joyce Carol Oates

“The strangeness of Time. Not in its passing, which can seem infinite, like a tunnel whose end you can't see, whose beginning you've forgotten, but in the sudden realization that something finite, has passed, and is irretrievable.”

Joyce Carol Oates book Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

Source: Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang

“A daydreamer is prepared for most things.”

Joyce Carol Oates

“My belief is that art should not be comforting; for comfort, we have mass entertainment and one another. Art should provoke, disturb, arouse our emotions, expand our sympathies in directions we may not anticipate and may not even wish.”

Joyce Carol Oates

“Keep a light, hopeful heart. But expect the worst.”