Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

Death is just the last scene of the last act.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

I have forced myself to begin writing when Ive been utterly exhausted, when Ive felt my soul as thin as a playing card…and somehow the activity of writing changes everything.

Fiction that adds up, that suggests a logical consistency, or an explanation of some kind, is surely second-rate fiction; for the truth of life is its mystery.

The ideal art, the noblest of art: working with the complexities of life, refusing to simplify, to overcome doubt.

When writing goes painfully, when it’s hideously difficult, and one feels real despair (ah, the despair, silly as it is, is real!)–then naturally one ought to continue with the work; it would be cowardly to retreat. But when writing goes smoothly–why then one certainly should keep on working, since it would be stupid to stop. Consequently one is always writing or should be writing.

For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imaginations caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable.

The denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our own lives.

Im drawn to write about upstate New York in the way in which a dreamer might have recurring dreams. My childhood and girlhood were spent in upstate New York, in the country north of Buffalo and West of Rochester. So this part of New York state is very familiar to me and, with its economic difficulties, has become emblematic of much of American life.

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

Warum man schreibt, ist eine Frage die sich der Schriftsteller, völlig versunken in seine Arbeit, nicht stellt. Theorien sind das Gebiet derer, die nicht handeln.

It isnt the subjects we write about but the seriousness and subtlety of our expression that determines the worth of or effort.

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

See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But theres a reason. There has to be

But he doesnt love her. I invented that. It is a plot if you imagine people in love--the lazy looping criss crosses of love, blows, stares, tears. No. It doesnt happen. No love. People meet, touch, stare into one anothers faces, shake their heads clear, move on, forget. It doesnt happen.

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.

I suggest to my students that they write under a pseudonym for a week. That allows young men to write as women, and women as men. It allows them a lot of freedom they dont have ordinarily.

Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art.

He was ugly, himself. Weird-ugly. But ugliness in a man doesnt matter, much. Ugliness in a woman is her life.

Legs was always proud even before FOXFIRE, that’s the primary fact about Legs Sadovsky: pride.