Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

The minutiae of our lives! Telephone calls, errands, appointments. None of these is of the slightest significance to others and but fleetingly to us yet they constitute such a portion of our lives, it might be argued that our lives are a concatenation of minutiae interrupted at unpredictable times by significant events.

The coolly calibrated manipulation of the credulous American public, by an administration bent upon stoking paranoid patriotism!

The gardener is the quintessential optimist: not only does he believe that the future will bear out the fruits of his efforts, he believes in the future.

For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom.

It is utterly naive, futile, uninformed—to think that our species is exceptional. So designated to master the beasts of the Earth, as in the Book of Genesis!

It may be that actual tears have stained the tile floors or soaked into the carpets of such places. It may be that these tears can never be removed. And everywhere the odor of melancholy, that is the very odor of memory.

Nowhere in a hospital can you walk without blundering into the memory pools of strangers—their dread of what was imminent in their lives, their false hopes, the wild elation of their hopes, their sudden terrible and irrefutable knowledge; you would not wish to hear echoes of their whispered exchanges—But he was looking so well yesterday, what has happened to him overnight—

Im sure all that youve heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.

My theory is that literature is essential to society in the way that dreams are essential to our lives. We cant live without dreaming - as we cant 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 cant fully understand.

I should say, one of the things about being a widow or a widower, you really, really need a sense of humor, because everythings going to fall apart.

Im drawn to failure. I feel like Im contending with it constantly in my own life.

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

Boxing has become Americas tragic theater.

Night comes to the desert all at once, as if someone turned off the light.

As a teacher at Princeton, Im surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I dont really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.

I havent any formal schedule, but I love to write in the morning, before breakfast. Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that I dont take a break for many hours - and consequently have breakfast at two or three in the afternoon on good days.

I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.

When my brother called to inform me, on the morning of May 22, 2003, that our mother Caroline Oates had died suddenly of a stroke, it was a shock from which, in a way, I have yet to recover.

In love there are two things - bodies and words.

The worst cynicism: a belief in luck.