Quotes by Joyce Carol Oates

Anyone who teaches knows that you dont really experience a text until youve taught it, in loving detail, with an intelligent and responsive class.

I think its very important for writers and artists generally to be witnesses to the world, and to be transparent. To let other people speak... to travel... to experience the world. And memorialize it.

I was brought up to be sympathetic toward others.

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.

Obviously the imagination is fueled by emotions beyond the control of the conscious mind.

Primarily, Black Girl/White Girl is the story of two very different, yet somehow fated girls; for Genna, her friendship with Minette is the most haunting of her life, though it is one-sided and ends in tragedy.

To write a novel is to embark on a quest that is very romantic. People have visions, and the next step is to execute them. Thats a very romantic project. Like Edvard Munchs strange dreamlike canvases where people are stylized, like The Scream. Munch must have had that vision in a dream, he never saw it.

The relationship between parents and children, but especially between mothers and daughters, is tremendously powerful, scarcely to be comprehended in any rational way.

When you are writing literary writing, you are communicating something subtextual with emotions and poetry. The prose has to have a voice; its not just typing. It takes a while to get that 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.

“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.”

“And this is the forbidden truth, the unspeakable taboo - that evil is not always repellent but frequently attractive; that it has the power to make of us not simply victims, as nature and accident do, but active accomplices.”

“. . . there is a wish in the heart of mankind to be distracted and confused. Truth is but one attraction, and not always the most powerful.”

“Unbidden, Unwelcome, Yet unable to resist, I entered a strangers life”

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

“For what are the words with which to summarize a lifetime, so much crowded confused happiness terminated by such stark slow-motion pain?”

“Death is just the last scene of the last act.”

“In love there are two things - bodies and words. ”