Quotes By Joyce Carol Oates

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

A typical biography relying upon individuals' notorious memories and the anecdotes they've invented contains a high degree of fiction, yet is considered 'nonfiction.'

I can't say I was a very successful sorority girl.

The great menace to the life of an industry is industrial self-complacency.

You need so much energy and encouragement to write that if someone says something negative, some of that energy goes.

A lot of widows feel that they have betrayed their spouse by continuing to live. It's deranged thinking. I know that, but that doesn't stop you feeling it.

If food is poetry, is not poetry also food?

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

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.

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

As a teacher at Princeton, I'm surrounded by people who work hard so I just make good use of my time. And I don't really think of it as work - writing a novel, in one sense, is a problem-solving exercise.

Love is an indescribable sensation - perhaps a conviction, a sense of certitude.

A writer can't subtract or excise any of his/her past because doing so would erase the work produced during that time.

I have read on a Kindle. But the Kindle we had only worked for about eight months then it stopped working. You don't have to get books repaired.

What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.

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

It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.

The books I read I do enjoy, very much; otherwise I wouldn't read them. Most of them are for review, for the New York Review of Books, and substantial.

Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.

After my parents passed away - in 2000 and 2003 - I felt I could take the time to think about the past and imagine what it would have been like to be my grandmother.

Love commingled with hate is more powerful than love. Or hate.

Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.

Boxing is about being hit rather more than it is about hitting, just as it is about feeling pain, if not devastating psychological paralysis, more than it is about winning.

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

If a book I've committed myself to review turns out to be 'disappointing' I make an effort to present it objectively to the reader, including a good number of excerpts from the text, so that the reader might form his or her own opinion independent of my own.

Yes, I've listened to just a few audiobooks - but hope to listen to more. I've wanted to investigate how my own books sound in this format and find the experience of listening, and not reading, quite fascinating.

The third man in the ring makes boxing possible.

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

I really love to set things in places that are real to me.

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.