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Joyce Carol Oates Quotes
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Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963 and has since published over 40 novels, as well as a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them , two O. Henry Awards, and the National Humanities Medal. Her novels Black Water , What I Lived For , Blonde , and short story collections The Wheel of Love and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize.

Oates has taught at Princeton University since 1978 and is currently the Roger S. Berlind '52 Professor Emerita in the Humanities with the Program in Creative Writing.

✵ 16. June 1938
Joyce Carol Oates photo
Joyce Carol Oates: 89   quotes 2   likes

Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

“Nothing is accidental in the universe — this is one of my Laws of Physics — except the entire universe itself, which is Pure Accident, pure divinity. So it cannot be an accident that I think of you so constantly.”

Joyce Carol Oates

"The Summing Up: Meredith Dawe," Do What You Will (1970)

Law , Thinking , Universe

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

Joyce Carol Oates

As quoted in "Master Race," Partisan Review 50th Anniversary Edition (1985), edited by William Phillips

“If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?”

Joyce Carol Oates

"Writers’ Hunger: Food as Metaphor," New York Times (19 August 1986)

Food

“The writer is a “somewhat mystical” — or do I mean “mythical?””

Joyce Carol Oates

person.
Joyce Carol Oates interviews herself (2013)

Personality

“The spectacle of human beings fighting each other for whatever reason, including, at certain well-publicized times, staggering sums of money, is enormously disturbing because it violates a taboo of our civilization. Many men and women, however they steel themselves, cannot watch a boxing match because they cannot allow themselves to see what it is they are seeing. One thinks helplessly, This can’t be happening, even as, and usually quite routinely, it is happening. In this way boxing as a public spectacle is akin to pornography: in each case the spectator is made a voyeur, distanced, yet presumably intimately involved, in an event that is not supposed to happening as it is happening. The pornographic "drama," though as fraudulent as professional wrestling, makes a claim for being about something absolutely serious, if not humanly profound: it is not so much about itself as about the violation of a taboo. That the taboo is spiritual rather than physical, or sexual — that our most valuable human experience, love, is being is being desecrated, parodied, mocked — is surely at the core of our culture’s fascination with pornography.”

Joyce Carol Oates

On Boxing (1987)

Love , Women , Men , Money

“There is the expectation that a younger generation has the opportunity to redeem the crimes and failings of their elders and would have the strength and idealism to do so.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Address at Mount Holyoke College (2006)

“Old women snore violently. They are like bodies into which bizarre animals have crept at night; the animals are vicious, bawdy, noisy. How they snore! There is no shame to their snoring. Old women turn into old men.”

Joyce Carol Oates

"What Is the Connection Between Men and Women?" Mademoiselle (February 1970)

Women , Men , Animals , Night

“At a time when politics deals in distortions and half truths, truth is to be found in the liberal arts. There's something afoot in this country and you are very much a part of it.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Address at Mount Holyoke College (2006)

Truth , Art , Time , Parting

“Writers and artists never pay attention to advice given by their elders, quite rightly. The only worthwhile advice is the most general: Keep trying, don’t give up, don’t be discouraged, don’t pay attention to detractors. Everyone knows this.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates interviews herself (2013)

“Boxing is a celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.”

Joyce Carol Oates

On Boxing (1987)

Religion , Box

“Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Address at Mount Holyoke College (2006)

“In any case, raw aggression is thought to be the peculiar province of men, as nurturing is the peculiar province of women… The psychologist Erik Erikson discovered that, while little girls playing with blocks generally create pleasant interior spaces and attractive entrances, little boys are inclined to pile up the blocks as high as they can and then watch them fall down: "the contemplation of ruins," Erikson observes, "is a masculine specialty."”

Joyce Carol Oates

On Boxing (1987)

Women , Men , Girl , Boy

“It is not her body that he wants but it is only through her body that he can take possession of another human being, so he must labor upon her body, he must enter her body, to make his claim.”

Joyce Carol Oates

"In the Founders’ Room," Unholy Loves (1979)

“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it! — that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms — nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”

Joyce Carol Oates book You Must Remember This

You Must Remember This (1987), pt. 1, ch. 13

Color , Loss

“When you’re 50 you start thinking about things you haven’t thought about before. I used to think getting old was about vanity — but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Interview in The Guardian (18 August 1989)

Love , People , Thinking

“It's one of those secrets that's embarrassing to acknowledge, but we do love our students.”

Joyce Carol Oates

Address at Mount Holyoke College (2006)

Love , Secret

“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!”

Joyce Carol Oates book You Must Remember This

that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms — nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?
You Must Remember This (1987), pt. 1, ch. 13

Color